Description of the World

A new poetry collection from the Giller Prize–winning author of The Sentimentalists and Quartet for the End of Time.

In The Description of the World Johanna Skibsrud brings us to the edges of dreams – and waking. With lines that are searching, but spacious, she deftly turns over ideas of perception and reality, inviting us to join her as she releases the abstract figure from its painting, or brings the poet in from the wilderness. This is a collection about possibility. The possibility of language and naming, of dropping – or not dropping – an atomic bomb, of giving birth, of love.

Contributors

Johanna Skibsrud

Johanna Skibsrud is the author of two previous collections of poetry, I Do Not Think that I Could Love a Human Being and Late Nights With Wild Cowboys; two novels, Quartet for the End of Time and the 2010 Scotiabank Giller Prize–winning novel The Sentimentalists; and the short fiction collection This Will Be Difficult to Explain and Other Stories. An Assistant Professor of English at the University of Arizona, Skibsrud and her family divide their time between Tucson and Cape Breton.

Chapter Contributors Pages Year Price
Dream a narrowing – Draw a single moment – When, after a thought – Brief Sketches of an Open Field
7 $0.70
Maestro Bartolome Reconsiders his Creation of Eve – “Come and See the Blood in the Streets!” – The Abstract Figure Dreams of His Release – I Give My Powers Away …
6 $0.60
Everything in the World is Open – Sestina – The Description of the World
5 $0.50
In the Dream, it Shows – Introduction to Repetition – The Real is That Which Always Comes Back to the Same Place – The Other, Already There
5 $0.50
At Last, The Poet Returns to the City
2 $0.20
Flying Home Aboard the Enola Gay – Incident aboard the Lucky Dragon: March 1, 1954 – August 5, 1963 – Firing at the King of Clubs – Study for the End of the World
6 $0.60
Whitewater Draw
3 $0.30
Sunrise with Sea Monsters
4 $0.40
To be Born is the Supreme Loneliness – Ars Poetica – “Hunters in the Snow”
5 $0.50