“like Emily Dickinson, Hartog melds the ordinary with the visionary.” — Joseph Stroud, author of Below Cold Mountain and Country of Light

Ink Monkey is Diana Hartog's first book of poetry in more than thirteen years, and her patience is the reader's reward. In these spare and elegant poems — not a word out of place, not an unnecessary syllable — Hartog turns a perceptive eye toward the stories of seemingly ordinary things, of overlooked moments and long-closed rooms. Whether she is writing about jellyfish, the desert, awkward silences that end a relationship, struggles of creativity, or Japanese prints, her poems are astute and beautiful.

Something “up his sleeve,” as when a man in the West simply
leans against a wall with his hands in his pockets

and a woman walks by, her starched French cuff dangling an
abalone button blinded with thread. The Muse leaning also,

towards the East and the past: the poetic looseness of kimono sleeves,
damp with tears, in the Japanese canon of love. Sweet partings, trysts,

exposing always the wrist, its pale throat, the heartbeat's
muted throb at the fork of the two blue rivers “

from “Sleeves?

?Give Diana Hartog a subject — monkeys, frogs, jellyfish, or a Japanese printmaker on the Tokaido road — and she will play riffs that dazzle “. With an adhesive poet's tongue, Hartog picks through her seemingly endless erudition for the humorous bits — Leda in a hotel room leaving her feathers in the ashtray — and yet she can crack the heart, as in the image 'the grass — whipped every-which-way as if wild with grief. “'” — Rosemary Sullivan

Diana Hartog lives in New Denver, B.C. Her first book, Matinee Light, won the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award from the League of Canadian Poets. Of that book critics said:`Hartog`s perceptions of human nature are astute, intelligent and delightfully sympathetic to the human condition.` - Kinesis `The world of these poems is one of flickering but very sharp images, much like the moving pictures of her California childhood,.. the afternoons of matinee light.` Sharon Thesen, Line`A beautifully constructed, disciplined first collection, filled with ironic wit, sensual vitality and subtlety.`- Malahat Review

Diana Hartog's profile page

"Ink Monkey ... acquaints us with an intelligence that generates quirky, surprising and vivid images ... all of Hartog is worth reading!"--George Elliott Clarke, Halifax Chronicle-Herald

"There's something mirage-like about Hartog's poems. They encourage the reader to look, then look again."--Barabara Carey, The Toronto Star