There is beauty in the teacup like dresses requiring crinoline or beaded purses too small to carry anything but anger. — from “Inheritance”

Marita Dachsel’s third poetry collection explores parenthood, love, and the grief of losing those both close and distant. In the tradition of Karen Solie and Suzanne Buffam, and with a touch of Canadian Gothic, Dachsel’s poetic skills unfold in a variety of brief and expansive forms. Authentic and controlled, full of complexity and disorder, her poems offer release despite their painful twists and topics. Readers across generations will find kinship in Dachsel’s grief-fuelled and vulnerable words.

Marita Dachsel is the author of Glossolalia, Eliza Roxcy Snow, and All Things Said & Done. Her poetry has been shortlisted for the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry and the ReLit Prize and has appeared in many literary journals and anthologies, including Best Canadian Poetry in English, 2011. Her play Initiation Trilogy was nominated for the Jessie Richardson Award for Outstanding New Script. She is the 2013/2014 Artist-in-Residence at UVic's Centre for Studies in Religion and Society. After many years in Vancouver and Edmonton, she and her family now live in Victoria.

Marita Dachsel's profile page

"Dachsel’s poems also offer a kind of spiritual clarity, navigating a sequence of uncertainties with a careful confidence..."

Rob Mclennan

"...strike a balance between the potent dramas of family life and the sense that all can be lost in a moment of forgetfulness, or the ever-ready subsuming of mortality.... The balance is maintained, but like a teacup on the tip of a pencil, and the value of the collection rests in our recognition that we, too, search for that balance." [Full review at https://ormsbyreview.com/2020/03/20/775-carroll-dachsel-thornton/]

The Ormsby Review

# 1 on Edmonton Fiction Bestsellers list, April 3, 2019

"These [three] fine collections focus on loss... Wisdom of both the aging and the ages shines through. Wistfully, they explore growing older and what comes next—or doesn’t.... Dachsel’s more ribald images... are jolting and rich." [Full review at https://canlit.ca/article/never-enough-sad-poems]

Canadian Literature