Visceral and playful, tend reflects the intimate awkwardness of modern life. Hargreaves' latest collection explores feelings of being distanced from loved ones, physically and emotionally; striving to be better (at chores, at intimacy); and tending to the things that fracture.

These poems are anchored in the body, straining the edges of spaces that bodies and language inhabit: between sealing in and digging out; restlessness and isolation; memory and planning for the future; gaps in texts and reiterations. tend is an immersive work, as validating as it is illuminating.

Kate Hargreaves is a poet, fiction writer, book designer and roller derby skater. Her first book, Talking Derby: Stories from a Life on Eight Wheels (Black Moss, 2012), is a collection of short prose vignettes inspired by playing women’s flat-track roller derby. Hargreaves’ poetry has been published in literary journals across North America, including Descant, filling Station, The Puritan, Drunken Boat, The Antigonish Review, Canada and Beyond, Carousel, and Rampike, and has also appeared in the anthologies Whisky Sour City (Black Moss, 2012) and Detours (Palimpsest, 2012), and the Windsor Review’s “Best Writers Under 35” issue. Hargreaves was the recipient of a Windsor Endowment for the Arts Emerging Literary Artist award in 2011 and a Governor General’s Gold Medal in Graduate Studies at the University of Windsor in 2012, where she obtained her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in English & Creative Writing. Kate grew up in Amherstburg, Ontario, but now lives in Windsor, where she works as a publishing assistant and book designer at Biblioasis. Follow her on Twitter @TalkingDerby and connect with her on Facebook www.facebook.com/TalkingDerby.

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“tend is an optimistic and occasionally joyful collection of dark complexities, centred around care, from self-care to gardening, and the ways in which we wish to interact with the wonderfully complex and convoluted worlds of nature, other humans, poems and ourselves. Hargreaves utilizes rhythm throughout the poems assembled here that is quite interesting, allowing a breathless, halting or otherwise propulsive patter to further her poems as much as anything involving language, meaning or purpose.” —rob mclennan, periodicities