A More Tender Ocean

Natalee Caple made quite a splash with her first two books, *The Heart is its Own Reason*, a short-story collection from Insomniac Press, and *The Plight of Happy People in an Ordinary World*, a novel from House of Anansi Press. With *A More Tender Ocean* Caple turns her hand to poetry, and the results are no less dazzling. The poems were written using a Surrealist technique called automatic writing – a kind of poetic impressionism after speed-reading. The effect is a kind of dreamlike state – everything isn't quite as it should be, as though it had all been seen through the facet of a diamond. The poems are lyrical, erotic, gentle, happy, sad and strangely beautiful. *A More Tender Ocean* is unusual but immensely moving and compelling, tender but not maudlin. 'What goes on seems ordinary,' writes Caple. Rest assured, it is not.