Orion Sweeping

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22 Debut Canadian poetry collections to read, CBC 2022

Anne Marie Todkill’s debut recalibrates the anxiety of the present. It gives doubt a hearing, finding resilience in fragility and grace in unexpected places.

The poems assembled in Orion Sweeping take nothing at face value. What are we to make of a radioactive souvenir, a shape-shifting dog, landscapes made strange by time? The speakers gathered here seek to set the record straight: a mink gives advice; a wolf disputes a rumour; a photographer zooms in on a kill; a military strategist gives lessons in peace. But the sum of the evidence is not bleak. A baby arrives as robustly as a whale; the solidarity of marriage is enacted in surprising ways; father and daughter share a gift for reprieve. Under the penetrating gaze of these poems, beauty and tenderness come quietly into view.

Contributors

Anne Marie Todkill

Anne Marie Todkill has lived mainly in her home town, Ottawa, but has been setting down new roots in Wollaston Township, Ontario, where she lives off-grid with her husband. She spent many years as a medical and academic editor, but never strayed far from her lifelong, intersecting preoccupations with writing and the natural world. She has won Arc Poetry Magazine’s Poem of the Year contest, was a recipient of Arc’s Diana Brebner Prize, and placed first – twice – in The New Quarterly’s Nick Blatchford Occasional Verse Contest. She is also a past winner of The Malahat Review’s Creative Nonfiction Prize, and her winning entry in Malahat’s Novella Contest was subsequently anthologized in Best Canadian Stories. Orion Sweeping is her first book.
Chapter Title Contents Contributors Pages Year Price

Preview

January – Strontium – Trinitite – Near Los Alamos – The public staircase in Toronto now named the Baldwin steps – Route options – Trove – Trace – … 20 $2.00

Preview

Remex – Central Experimental Farm, April – yard duty – Chickadee – November, Stormont County – Flight delay with telephoto – Flock 17 $1.70

Preview

Orion sweeping – Clearing windthrow from the trail – Wash day – Laser correction of posterior capsular opacification subsequent to cataract implant surgery – Fall risk … 22 $2.20

Preview

Slant – War stories – One day the trees went mystical – Biographical fallacy – Fish science – Remembrance Day – Marco Polo 12 $1.20

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The wolf explains – The father justifies himself – The sultan recollects – An embroideress reflects 8 $0.80