In Stranger, Nyla Matuk’s provocative, unabashedly sensual voice leads us to revelations about how our lives are increasingly disembodied by social media’s flattened, outward identity markers. In place of this contested sense of self, Stranger reckons with a range of possible states of unknowing. Have we over-determined our identities, and thus diminished our appetites? “I fell asleep between two cold rivers,” Matuk reports, “while the blue shadows of uncomplicated / conifers leaned into their own.” Bold and spontaneous, piling images and ideas on top of each other to create opulent sound patterns, these poems reawaken the reader’s sense of wonder.

An urbane, surrealist-influenced, lexically ingenious whip-smartness shot through with a beating-heart desire." Stewart Cole, The Urge

"Collisions of language and metaphor are so daring, the jumps between image and image so precipitous." Lorraine York, Canadian Literature

"Matuk has a deep command of language and is unafraid to draw from all its resources to represent the tangible happenstances of our object heart." Catherine Owen, Marrow Reviews

Nyla Matuk is the author of Sumptuary Laws (Véhicule Press, 2012) and Stranger (Véhicule Press, 2016). Her poems have appeared in Canada, the U.S., and the U.K. including The New Yorker, PN Review, The Walrus, and Poetry. She has been nominated for the Walrus Poetry Prize and the Gerald Lampert Memorial Prize. In 2018, she was the Mordecai Richler Writer in Residence.

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