Longlisted for the 2008 ReLit Awards

Humane ethnographer, passionate memoirist, lyricist of the acute moment, Lorri Neilsen Glenn explores memory as legacy.

Lorri Neilsen Glenn’s poems welcome the reader into a place where the strange is made familiar and the familiar reveals its own magic. Here the combustible materials of childhood and old age are always potentially present, and the attention paid them multi-dimensional. Her poems engage their subjects with wits and senses on full alert, whether the occasion is an encounter with the full moon during a lonely drive across the prairies, a raucous community dance at the oldest dance hall in the Maritimes, or the opening of the door into “the small town inside”. Reaching from nature to human nature, often drawn by the long line and the hum of loss, Neilsen Glenn explores a full range of poetic possibilities.

… Obsidian, you think, the word
itself a jewel, but no, more likely granite, custodian of this
bleak point where the wind’s good arm can pitch you over the edge

with ease, alms for the Atlantic. …

from “Signal Hill, NL”

“– these are poems with a wonderfully long reach, honed through an awareness of mortality and time’s looping returns. …Neilsen Glenn’s ear is contemporary, her humour mordant at times, her lyric radar open to dark silhouettes of absence and moments packed with the phenomenally joyous. ‘Clutching a piece of the brink,’ she nets lives with a clear eye and a precision of image that is startling. This is a collection that points us remarkably to our being here.” – Daphne Marlatt