In these deeply humanistic poems of witness and questioning, Croatian-born poet natasha nuhanovic finds beauty and hope amid brutality and the smouldering debris of landscapes both personal and geographical. In these simply stated, sometimes surreal lullabies in reverse, it is the moment of awareness that is paramount, that difficult achievement of presence in the physical world. The poems in Stray Dog Embassy are about seeing what is in front of us: 'Everybody talked about clouds but nobody mentioned / the old forgotten sky that shakes like a beggar.' This collection marks the debut of a unique voice on the Canadian literary landscape.

Natasha Nuhanovic was born in 1984 in Zagreb, Croatia. At nine, she moved to Germany, and at fourteen, to Canada. Natasha completed an Honours B.A. in English and German Literature at the University of Waterloo and an M.A. in Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto. Her poems have been published in literary journals in Germany, Bosnia and Canada, and in the chapbook Painted Photographs (2005). She has translated poems from and into German, English and Serbo-Croatian. Stray Dog Embassy is her first full-length book.

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The athletic and the aesthetic ice dance a duet in this collection of fast, fun verse from the winter olympics' first poet-in-residence.Ó (Steven Heighton, author of Every Lost Country and Patient Frame)