In this vibrant debut, Ellie Sawatzky rustles the underbrush of identity, seeking clarity on the nature of ownership and belonging. Haunted and inspired by old boyfriends, girls named Emily, ancestral ghosts, polar bears and mythic horses, None of This Belongs to Me plots a young woman’s coming of age in a time of environmental and socio-economic peril. From rural Ontario to Kitsilano to Burning Man, Sawatzky inquires into childhood learning, girlhood learning, what is inherited, what is acquired, what begins to take form in the iridescent space between innocence and experience (“The body’s crystal arithmetic”). Superimposing dreamscapes on realities, history on pop culture and everyday sorrows, this collection is a hymn for the broken-hearted, a plea for connection in the information age, and a call to question the ways in which we both nurture and harm one another and our environment.

None of This Belongs to Me is pertinent now more than ever, as Sawatzky’s generation comes of age in a tumultuous time, forced to consider all of that which does not—and may never—belong to them. These poems invite readers to explore our inner and outer worlds, to question the ways we inhabit them, to infuse our modern lives with our potent histories.

Ellie Sawatzky is a writer from Kenora, ON. She was a finalist for the 2019 Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers, and the recipient of CV2’s 2018 Young Buck Poetry Prize. Her work has been published widely in literary journals and anthologies such as The Fiddlehead, PRISM International, Best Canadian Poetry, The Matador Review, Prairie Fire, The Puritan and Room. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of British Columbia and lives in Vancouver, BC. None of This Belongs to Me is her debut poetry collection.

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"“Loneliness is its own magic, the way the earth makes room.” This book is shimmer, fire and parch, a fever dream of nostalgia and lament, like a startling tumble into a cold lake or the trance of sleeping too long in the sun. These poems thrum with the natural world and the uneasy fresh starts of womanhood “digressing in the rattler-happy crabgrass.” Run to them."

Nancy Lee, author of <i>Dead Girls</i>

"“A man floats by with a bouquet / of greyhounds”; “doctors windsurf between ice floes / sipping martinis from IV bags”; “a girl sees a man pee her name in the sand” and a woman “zoom(s) out / on the lithium-green Anthropocene,” only to find hope in a “post-Tinder codeine dream.” These poems surprise me in my favourite way. Line by line, they throw off sparks. They shed estranging light on a world I thought I knew, and cover vast landscapes in a line break. In this searching and disarmingly intimate debut, Ellie Sawatzky waves a glowstick through the dark night of the soul."

Suzanne Buffam, author of <i>The Irrationalist</i>