Out to Dry in Cape Breton

Like the laundry that greets readers at the start of Anita Lahey's astonishing debut -- hanging on clotheslines and bodied out in breezes -- the poems in this collection exist in a state of thrumming levitation. Lahey's scampish play with idioms, her accelerated sense of traditional forms, and her omnivorous eye for fresh imagery lead to a poetry constantly streaming with surprises. These are musical, hyperstimulated, shape-shifting poems that draw on their subjects -- a high diver, World War I female munitions workers, a mangled shopping cart -- to conduct inspired, often irreverent, investigations into the marginal details of our world. The collection concludes with a long poem where Lahey's gifts combine to create a large-spirited, unsentimental vision of a Maritime world free of fiddlers and romantic fishing tales: one instead brimming with honesty, humour, paradox, and grit.