Poets have always wrestled with the mutability of things (particularly or life and love) and with the problem of conveying the true shape of human emotion and experience through the often inadequate tool of language. The poems in Johanna Skibsrud’s new collection, I Do Not Think that I Could Love a Human Being, employ the tentative and uncertain characteristics of language to their advantage, pulling the reader headlong into the fray as the poet endeavours to give shape to her experience.

“In many ways, I see the collection as one long love poem,” says Skibsrud, “The title poem was written very quickly, and with what, for me, was relative ease one morning last spring, and since then I have altered it very little–something that is also unusual for me. The poem is particularly important to my conception of the collection as a whole because of the way that it is able to speak, I think, from–and to–a space of desire inhabited, simultaneously, by conflicting and conflicted states of mind. It is, I think–despite, or rather because of its title–the most accurate and honestly-felt love poem that I have so far been able to write. Also, though, I think of the poem in reflexive terms: as in part about the act of writing, which is itself an act of desire and so, like all desire, bound always by the limits of its own terms. Just as the literal object of the poem is held in relief by the blank space of the page, however, so we are shaped, whether we choose to recognize it or not, by what is invisible to us–outside of what we assume to be the limit of ourselves and our world. Poetry allows us, importantly, I think, to push against that limit. It makes room for those paradoxes at the root of our experiences of language and selfhood–an acceptance and exploration of which is, I think, integral, to any genuine attempt at expression of being. It allows for transformations, for becomings: becoming a bear, for example, becoming a word. Love allows for this, too. In fact, I don’t really know where the space of one ends and the other begins.”

Johanna Skibsrud is a novelist, poet and Assistant Professor of English at the University of Arizona. Her debut novel, The Sentimentalists, was awarded the 2010 Scotiabank Giller Prize, making her the youngest writer to win Canada's most prestigious literary prize. The book was subsequently shortlisted for the Commonwealth Book Award and is currently translated into five languages. The New York Times Book Review describes her most recent novel, Quartet for the End of Time (Norton 2014) as a "haunting" exploration of "the complexity of human relationships and the myriad ways in which identity can be malleable." "It is exhilarating", writes the Washington Post, "to join a novelist working at these bracing heights." Johanna is also the author of two collections of short fiction: This Will Be Difficult to Explain (2011; shortlisted for the Danuta Gleed Award) and Tiger, Tiger (2018), a children's book, and three books of poetry. Her latest poetry collection, The Description of the World (2016), was the recipient of the 2017 Canadian Author's Association for Poetry and the 2017 Fred Cogswell Award. Johanna's poems and stories have been published in Zoetrope, Ecotone, and Glimmertrain Magazine, among numerous other journals. Her scholarly essays have appeared in, among other places, The Luminary, Excursions, Mosaic, TIES, and The Brock Review. A critical monograph titled The Poetic Imperative: A Speculative Aesthetics is forthcoming. A novel, Island, will also be published by Hamish Hamilton Canada in fall 2019.

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