Books & Reviews
Burmese Lessons, a love story
When Karen Connelly first goes to Burma in 1996 to gather information for a series of articles about political prisoners, she discovers a place of unexpected beauty and generosity. She also encounters a country ruled by a brutal military dictatorship that imposes a code of censorship and terror. Carefully seeking out the regimes critics, she witnesses mass demonstrations, attends protests, interviews detained opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, and flees from the riot police herself. When it gets too risky to stay, Connelly flies back to Thailand, but she cannot leave Burma behind. READ MORE...
The Lizard Cage
In her long-awaited first novel, Karen Connelly recreates the world of a Burmese prison, and of the country’s tumultuous years in the late 1980’s, when millions of people rose up to protest against the brutality of READ MORE...
Grace and Poison
Grace and Poison combines The Small Words In My Body and The Disorder of Love in one volume, and includes a long introductory essay that explores the connections between poetry READ MORE...
The Border Surrounds Us
The hardest frontiers to cross / are the ones inside our skin.” Addressing the political from the realm of personal experience, Karen Connelly has been compared to Carolyn Forche and, mostly recently, Pablo Neruda. The most moving pieces in this book--and some of this writer’s READ MORE...
The Disorder of Love
These are poems about love--for friends, for landscapes, for family--and serious lust. Sometimes wild, sometimes quietly vibrant, the borders of this work are hard to define, as are the women and men Connelly READ MORE...
One Room In A Castle
An adventurous, intimate exploration of three different Mediterrenean cultures, One Room in a Castle is a collection of letters, poems, and short stories from Connelly’s sojourns in Spain, France, and MORE...
Touch The Dragon
A national bestseller for two years, the winner of the Governor General’s Award in 1993, and a New York Times Notable Travel Book of the Year in 2000, Touch the Dragon, A Thai Journal is a rare and dazzling exploration of a young writer’s brave new world READ MORE...
This Brighter Prison
Set in Basque Spain, France, Greece, and her native Calgary, these poems enact journeys of the body and heart with candour and sensuous grace, catching the very texture of human experience READ MORE...
The Small Words in My Body
Published when Connelly was twenty-one, this book won the Pat Lowther Award in 1991 for best poetry book of the year by a Canadian woman. Connelly wrote many of these poems when she was in her middle and late teens, but READ MORE...
Dream of a Thousand Lives
A New York Times Notable Travel Book of the Year in 2002
This book is the American edition of the Governor-General Award-winning Touch The Dragon. Please see Touch The Dragon for more information and an excerpt of the journal. READ MORE...