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About

Harold Rhenisch

Harold Rhenisch is an award-winning poet, critic, and cultural commentator. His awards include the Confederation Poetry Prize in 1991 and the BC #38: Yukon Community Newspapers Association Award for Best Arts and Culture Writing in 1996. He is a seven-time runner-up for the CBC/Tilden/Saturday Night Literary Contest. In 2005, he won the ARC Magazine Critics Desk Award for best long poetry review and the Malahat Review Long Poem Prize for "Abandon." He won this prize again in 2007 for "The Bone Yard." His non-fiction book Tom Thomson's Shack was short-listed for two BC Book Prizes in 2000. For its sequel, The Wolves at Evelyn, he won the 2007 George Ryga Award for Social Responsibility in Literature. He is the author of 32 books of poetry, fiction, biography and essays and choreographed Richard Rathwell’s Human Nation for the paper stage. Along with the Norwegian Olav Hauge, he is one of the two poets in the world who learned to write and edit poems by pruning fruit trees, an experience documented in his The Tree Whisperer (Gaspereau, 2021). A direct heir of Bertolt Brecht’s theater, through the dissident playwright and novelist Stefan Schütz, whose radio play Peyote he translated and published, he has invented a theatrical set of cross-genre literary interventions. He has secretly edited and mentored over a hundred writers in the hinterlands of Canada unserved by its university and publishing system and is currently writing a transcultural natural history curriculum and a history of British Columbia centred in the Indian Wars of the American West.

Books by Harold Rhenisch

The Salmon Shanties

A Cascadian Song Cycle

by (author) Harold Rhenisch

Don't Expect the Sun to Shine

A Wake for Robin Blaser

by (author) Richard E. Rathwell
adapted by Harold Rhenisch

The Tree Whisperer

Writing Poetry by Living in the World

by (author) Harold Rhenisch

The Art of Haying

A Journey to Iceland

by (author) Harold Rhenisch

Two Minds

by (author) Harold Rhenisch

The Voyageur Modern Canadian Literature 5-Book Bundle

The Silence on the Shore / Combat Journal for Place d'Armes / The Donnellys / In This Poem I Am / Canadian Exploration Literature

by (author) Hugh Garner, James Reaney, Robin Skelton, Germaine Warkentin & Scott Symons
introduction by Paul Stuewe, Alan Filewod & Christopher Elson
edited by Harold Rhenisch

The Wolves at Evelyn

Journeys through a Dark Century

by (author) Harold Rhenisch

Winging Home

A Palette of Birds

by (author) Harold Rhenisch

A Room in the City

Photographs of Gabor Gasztonyi

by (photographer) Gabor Gasztonyi
introduction by Harold Rhenisch & Gabor Mate

Rocksalt

An Anthology of Contemporary BC Poetry

edited by Mona Fertig & Harold Rhenisch

In This Poem I Am

Selected Poetry of Robin Skelton

by (author) Robin Skelton
edited by Harold Rhenisch

Return to Open Water

Poems New and Selected

by (author) Harold Rhenisch

The Wolves at Evelyn

Journeys through a Dark Century

by (author) Harold Rhenisch

Winging Home

A Palette of Birds

by (author) Harold Rhenisch

Linda Rogers

edited by Harold Rhenisch

Living Will

by (author) Harold Rhenisch

Free Will

by (author) Harold Rhenisch

Peyote

by (author) Stefan Schutz
translated by Harold Rhenisch

Tom Thomson's Shack

by (author) Harold Rhenisch

Carnival

by (author) Harold Rhenisch

Taking the Breath Away

by (author) Harold Rhenisch

Blue Mouth Of Morning

by (author) Harold Rhenisch

Out of the Interior

The Lost Country

by (author) Harold Rhenisch