Adrienne Gruber's This Is The Nightmare is the poet's quest for exit signs, both mutual and solitary. Or is it an entrance she looks for through the forests of family and love and the changing of people, seasons and landscapes — Either way, there are certain connections that you can only make in the time between your seasons — a pitchfork lost to the snow, a relationship frozen in time, scars that lift from music notes, and words that find you even in dreams. In the awakening, when nature is at work both revealing and recovering, when who you were becomes who you are, there is clarity. This is the Nightmare captures these moments as rituals that reveal the disharmony of existence; and need for encounters with angels, both real and ethereal, who guide us to understand what cannot be dismissed, ignored or denied.

Adrienne Gruber is the author of the poetry collection This Is The Nightmare (2008; shortlisted for the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry) and three chapbooks: Intertidal Zones (2014), Mimic (2012; winner of a bpNichol Chapbook Award), and Everything Water (2011). Her work has appeared in numerous literary magazines, including Grain, Event, Arc Poetry Magazine, Poetry is Dead, and Plentitude. She has been a finalist for the CBC Literary Awards in poetry, Descant's Winston Collins Best Canadian Poem Contest, and twice for Arc's Poem of the Year Contest. Her poem "Gestational Trail" was awarded first prize in The Antigonish Review's Great Blue Heron Poetry Contest in 2015. Gruber lives in Vancouver with her partner Dennis and their two daughters. Her new book Buoyancy Control is forthcoming from BookThug in the spring of 2016. Learn more at http://adriennegruber.wordpress.com.

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