In Marlene Cookshaw's work time is slowed so that you can walk around in the moment, rub your knuckles on its nap, trace its lattice-work of airs and pressures, and touch the sensitive places left by accidents and old loves. Life seems to come forward to meet speech, even as speech is reaching to its edge. You breathe the salt tang of the particular.

See where the mind goes? Between the lovely knots, a silk always strong enough to bear its weight. That throwing's what I love, what I would give my life to. Lacinato. Champion. Rougette. Red cabbages dense and beautiful as turbans, roses, words, like a row of toothy kisses, sweet, unmanageable, raw. from "Clear to me now"

"Marlene Cookshaw's poems are unusually beautiful and disturbing because her approach to poetry is so meticulous and her approach to life so open to transience and chance. Her art is both elegant and virtuous, a fine music focused on raw emotion, raw matter. What do her close observations of things teach her? 'To give yourself up/ to what wants you, over and over.' She builds her strong poems not as quake-proof rooms from which to view the tumult, but as catwalks reaching through untested space towards Change itself, so she can ask what it demands of her." - John Steffler

Born and raised in south Alberta, Marlene Cookshaw now lives on Pender Island and in Victoria, B.C. Since receiving her BFA in Creative Writing from the University of Victoria in 1984, she has taught at the Victoria School of Writing and served on juries for various writing awards, including the Dorothy Livesay Prize for Poetry, the Archibald Lampman Award, the Malahat Review Long Poem Prize, BC Festival of the Arts literary scholarships, and the BC Arts Council and provincial scholarships. She has been associated with the quarterly literary journal Malahat Review since 1985 and was its editor until 2004. Shameless (2002) was nominated for the Dorothy Livesay Prize. Lunar Drift (2006) is a chronology of poems that ostensibly marches through time, from 4241 BC, the first numbered date in human history, to a hotel tryst in Room 39. Cookshaw has received the Robinson Jeffers Tor House Prize for Poetry and the Ralph Gustafson Poetry Prize.

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