What happens when we believe in something that isn't there? What happens when we doubt our own history? We cling to the solidity of physical space. Our abstracted sense of being swells to its limits, presses against its boundary of skin, bumps up against the world. Washing Off the Raccoon Eyes explores the idea that we as humans are undefined, chaotic, that we come to know ourselves through the spaces we inhabit and the people we encounter.

Margo LaPierre is a neuroqueer poet and freelance editor specializing in literary novels, historical novels, and memoirs. She is Arc Poetry’s newsletter editor and a member of the poetry collective VII. She won the 2021 Room Poetry Award and the 2020 subTerrain Fiction Award. She is completing her MFA in Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia. Her second collection of poetry is forthcoming with Guernica Editions in 2025.

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This collection of poetry is divided into three parts. The title poem is the last in the book and looks at how we deal with failure and find a way to move on. The poems here are thought-provoking, drawing on the impulse to believe and disbelieve, to search for a solid base in our lives. I really enjoyed the poems here, finding myself reading one and then sitting back to think on it, sometimes lingering or rereading a certain section, and thinking about how I related to similar situations in my own life. Very good.

Shonna Froebel, Canadian Bookworm

It is valid to question the possibility of objectivity regarding oneself, particularly as mental illness and addictions bend perspective. These poems are unafraid of shining light in all corners; LaPierre shows us that beauty and ugliness hold hands in the wasteland and, though acknowledged, both must be left there.

Jennifer Pederson, Canthius Magazine

There’s a lot to process in WASHING OFF THE RACCOON EYES for such a slim book, because it’s so richly varied in both style and subject matter. Taut surrealism. Fraught relationships. Fierce urban vignettes. Sometimes all in the same poem.

K.R. Wilson

These hard-edged, insistent, defiant poems rule under a quality of light that is not golden hour but neon and white incandescent. The poems have glittering turns of phrase to pique & speak their truths.

Pearl Pirie