These poems peel back the layers of suburban life and the American Dream. Vivian Maier was a self-taught street photographer who worked as a nanny for wealthy employers in New York and Chicago. The poet imagines her as a documentarian who is compassionate, abrasive, and meditative, while her subjects provide their own narrative. More than anything, the poems are a response to her work, which is all we have that comes directly from her. It is a deliberate challenge to the “mystery nanny” she is reduced to in much of the constructed narrative of her life.

Bruce Rice is a previous Saskatchewan Poet Laureate, an essayist, and editor. His writing moves from family and community to social history and meditations on landscape and wilderness. Bruce’s six books of poetry have received two Saskatchewan Book Awards and a Saskatchewan Book of the Year nomination. His first book, Daniel, won the Canadian Authors Association Award. Judges said it “portrays life’s hardships with an elegance of language which is stunning.” He has been called a master of light. Whether writing about prairie or the urban forest outside his door, he says, “I became a better poet when I surrendered to beauty.” Bruce lives in Regina on Treaty 4 Territory and the Métis homeland.

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