Maleea Acker’s dauntless new poetry collection is crafted with emotion and bold style.

Any day now I shall be released to the Bangladesh runaway,
its burnt out plane a little hulk from a different dimension,

a researcher of longing, no one selling Heineken
from a cooler in its unlit aisles, no one with a line to God.

Acker’s poems hang on precipices of emotion. They cartwheel from sadness to glory, then break into blossoms in a drought-struck landscape of longing. These are poems filled with daring leaps and precise, deft metaphors. There is machinery, there are imaginaries; a dictator selects the musical soundtrack. The poems cajole and praise both the world and interior life with an erotic charge and enduring hope.

Maleea Acker lives in Saanich, where she caused consternation to some of her neighbours in 2011 by transforming her yard into a small Garry Oak meadow.

Acker has worked in a variety of cultural, political and environmental areas, writing and designing for social and arts organizations and teaching poetry at Camosun College. Her first book, The Reflecting Pool (poetry) was published by Pedlar Press in 2009. Her non–fiction and poetry has appeared in various journals and magazines in Canada and Mexico. She holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of Victoria.

Acker is a member of the Society of Environmental Journalists and has received awards and fellowships for her writing from granting agencies and arts residencies in Canada, the USA, Mexico and Spain. Garden Aflame is Maleea Acker's first non–fiction book.

Maleea Acker's profile page

• Short-listed, City of Victoria Butler Book Prize

“Acker summons a sad, mysterious music, the self talking to the self as though after the end of the world. A book of mesmerizing lamentations, at once precise and surreal.”

Jan Zwicky

“To read Acker’s poetry from Mexico is to celebrate my own country. Her poems are inhabited by taquerias, by the characters I encounter daily, by the codes of coexistence that are not easy for a foreigner to understand and adopt. Reading this collection, too, is to recognize that it is these everyday details—the taquerias, the people and codes—that make a community meaningful, full of import, and, at the same time, lend an ethical dimension to the life of the individual.”

Argel Corpus