Bloom is the electrifying debut collection from one of our best emerging poets. If a studio technician could "remix" poems by modern and contemporary poets so they retold the story of the Manhattan Project from the viewpoint of Louis Slotin, simultaneously putting Robert Lowell in whispered conversation with Ted Hughes, as vocalized by a Canadian physicist from Winnipeg, over the current state of literary utopian projects, we'd hear something nearly as captivating as Michael Lista's Bloom. As it is, we also get "Lista" swimming ghostlike through this palimpsest-narrative, inhabiting Slotin and brashly "tickling the dragon's tail" at the nucleus of untested notions of creation, stasis, and destruction. In Bloom, one of the most dangerous historical fulcrums of the last century is somehow made viscerally present again, and, more wondrously, made to radiate outward into very current crises.

Michael Lista's reporting has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Slate, The Walrus and Toronto Life. He is the author of three books: the poetry volumes Bloom and The Scarborough, and Strike Anywhere, a collection of essays. He was the 2017 Margaret Laurence Fellow, a finalist for the Allan Slaight Prize for Journalism, and the winner of the 2020 National Magazine Award Gold Medals for both Investigative Reporting and Long Form Feature Writing. His story, "The Sting," is being adapted into a television series for Apple TV+.

Michael Lista's profile page

• Long-listed, ReLit Awards: Poetry
• Quill and Quire Books of the Year

Bloom is all one might hope for in a book of poetry: an unencumbered, nervy fusion of imagination and form.

Jennifer Still