In this amazing first collection of poetry, Habsbawn-Smith displays a skill and passion for capturing and creating experience through language. Here is a new, and original voice that sparks with intelligence in its full-tilt explorations of nature, solitude, joy, loss and love. At once sensory, contemplative, compassionate and packed full of startling insights, Wildness Rushing In is an exciting and accomplished poetic debut. "It will come as no surprise to readers of wildness rushing in that dee Hobsbawn-Smith is also an accomplished chef. Here is a feast of tastes and flavours arriving from many regions and nooks of existence, served up with a wisdom that knows its wordless "loveliness in loss" equally with its sharp jolts of awe. She's been there, and brought them to the writing with passion and wit. Savour the lovingly evoked texture of Bennett's old garage, with its Victory Bond poster and the typewriter ribbon unspooling from a shelf; the cow moose with its "dancer's drawl"; that painful moment when a lover's movements undressing flashes back to the father's arm reaching for the belt. These finely focussed poems invite us into a sensuous and emotionally rich landscape: o taste and see." - Don McKay

dee Hobsbawn-Smith's award-winning poetry, essays, and short fiction has appeared in publications in Canada, the USA, Scotland and elsewhere. She earned her MFA in Writing and
her MA in English Lit at the University of Saskatchewan. Her debut poetry collection, Wildness
Rushing In, published in 2014, was a finalist for Book of the Year and Best Poetry Collection at the Saskatchewan Book Awards. What Can't Be Undone: Stories was published in 2015. She's a
local foods advocate, active in Slow Food for more than twenty years, and has written a stack of books about food, including the award-winning Foodshed: An Edible Alberta Alphabet. She
served as the 35th Writer in Residence at Saskatoon Public Library in 2015. Bread & Water: Essays, published in 2021, won the Saskatchewan Book Awards' nonfiction prize. A new poetry
collection, Among the Untamed, is forthcoming next spring. dee lives on the remnants of her family's farm west of Saskatoon.

dee Hobsbawn-Smith's profile page

"Imagine this"-Colonel Williams' confession as black ice, time the "great white horse" rushing across the summer solstice sky, dead farm machines surfacing from ice as reincarnated dinosaurs, "a young mother's half-cooked / egg-like life," and you'll know something about wildness rushing in-"the great mutiny / of the unexpected." I'm struck by the presence of hands-touching, holding, gathering, making, cleaning, sorting, punishing,-throughout the book. Hands "make sense / of the thread of things" and in the end they create: "Close / your fingers on the clay and feel life / taking shape again." dee Hobsbawn-Smith's poems summon "first being / then not," the on-going exchange that governs not only human life but the universe itself. No mean feat! Maureen Scott Harris