Come Cold River

“This is a secret book for me. It took me several years to add this title to my list of published books. The cover photograph of the child under water is me. 

These poems are full of violence--often violence directed at vulnerable women and children. In my childhood, I was that child; and I have been that woman, at odds with forces against me, beyond me, and of me—my own violence. Though my life was shaped and defined by early trauma, it’s equally been shaped and defined by the courage of people who’ve faced and transformed their personal legacies of addiction, violence, and loss. 

So. This is an angry book full of forgiveness. These are love poems for addicts, for lost people trying to find the path home, and for all the broken and beautiful places I grew up in, and especially for the river that runs through Calgary.”

In Karen Connelly’s first collection of poetry since The Border Surrounds Us, the poet offers up a searing, complex portrayal of her troubled family. Refracted, augmented, drawn through various cities, streets and fields, over mountain ranges and foreign landscapes, this portrayal grows into an authentic homage to people who are often invisibilized or silenced. 

Simultaneously, it becomes an indictment of her own country, Canada, its long history of racism and unconscionable violence against women, children, addicts, and poor people. Never didactic, insistently real, these poems make us wonder “how to enter again/that unlikely tenderness/the cracked ribcage of the world/ as if it were the last shelter.”