This collection focuses on the link between landscape and language, place and identity. The poems extend this exploration through the themes of darkness, ignorance, loneliness, the familiar made strange and of how we deal with it in language as the images that haunt us are made tangible in words. Where the Night Comes Closest is divided into four movements…. In the Beginning, What Remains, Waking Up and Writing Down the Moon. It ends with a Coda in the form of a ghazal whose repetition of memory in all its forms sums up the four movements of the book.

Betsy Struthers has published eight books of poetry, including Still (Black Moss Press), winner of the 2004 Pat Lowther Memorial Award for the best book of poetry by a Canadian woman, and three novels as well as co-editing an anthology of essays about teaching poetry. Her first book of short stories, Relay: Short Fictions, was also published by Black Moss Press.Struthers received the Silver Medal as runner-up for the Milton Acorn People’s Poetry Award in 1994 and was short-listed for the Arthur Ellis Best First Novel Award in 1993 and the CBC Literary Awards in 2006. A past president of the League of Canadian Poets, she has read her work from coast to coast in Canada, in Australia, and in North Carolina, including the Sleeping Giant Literary Festival in Thunder Bay, the Spring Pulse Poetry Festival in Cobalt, Ontario, and the Labrador Creative Arts Festival in Happy Valley/Goose Bay. Her poems and fiction have been published in many anthologies (most recently, In Fine Form: The Canadian Book of Form Poetry and Going Top Shelf: An Anthology of Canadian Hockey Poetry) and literary journals; she has taught workshops in both poetry and fiction to students of all ages from kindergarten to adults. Resident in Peterborough since 1977, Struthers works as a freelance editor of academic texts.

Betsy Struthers' profile page