Michelle Brown's second book of poetry, Swans, begins as a night out between three best friends at an eponymous watering hole before becoming a phantasmagorical coming-of-age fable by closing time. In between, memory shifts and poems shuffle like songs on a jukebox, detailing fraught female friendship, sexual awakening, alcohol abuse and abandon in the dying days of a decade of decadence. Swans is a whip-smart collection from one of Canada's catchiest lyric poets.

Michelle Brown's first full-length collection of poetry, Safe Words was shortlisted for the 2018 ReLit award. A finalist for The Malahat Review's Open Season award, CV2’s Young Buck prize and the CBC poetry prize, her work has also appeared in The Walrus, Arc Poetry Magazine, Grain, PRISM International and The Puritan. After nearly a decade in Toronto, Michelle has recently returned to the West Coast, where she hangs out with her daughter, dog & husband.

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SWANS dips us tenderly into a time when impulse leaps into danger-- but somehow survives it. Who are we to survive such a thing? Who could we have been? Like deer leaping over fences, these poems surface fleetingly into a past that defines us, even as our other selves climb or glide through other doorways into the present and into the future.

Sarah Venart, author of I Am the Big Heart