Following the success of her bestselling 2015 gift book The Wild in You: Voices from the Forest and the Sea, Lorna Crozier offers another masterful collection of poems inspired by nature, this time set in the Frontenac Arch Biosphere Reserve in Southeastern Ontario. The House the Spirit Builds explores human-crafted and natural landscapes from a variety of angles. An image of a slice of light falling across a tablecloth, three oranges in a red bowl, a black beetle on a leaf – the impressions and expression vary, but all are informed by a sense of place and aim to take understanding to a more visceral plane.

Lorna Crozier has always been brilliant at fusing the ordinary with the other-worldly in strange and surprising ways. Now, the Governor General’s Literary Award-winning author of Inventing the Hawk returns with God of Shadows, a wryly wise book that offers a polytheistic gallery of the gods we never knew existed and didn’t know we needed. To read these poems is to be ready to offer your own prayers to the god of shadows, the god of quirks, and the god of vacant houses.

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Reviews

• “Crozier’s dense deity prose poems commanding” — Winnipeg Free Press

Profiles

• “Love in letters: Lorna Crozier remembers poetic romance with Patrick Lane” — National Post