The Living Option

Enormous credit goes to Bloodaxe for commissioning this exhilarating volume, Solie’s first book publication outside Canada...there is hardly a poem in The Living Option that I wouldn't cite with alacrity and delight. -- Michael Hofmann * London Review of Books *
A fierce writing of quickness and edge that can take on just about anything: the highway, Freud, farm suicides, sturgeon, all manner of flawed and far-off romance - with candour and a trenchant humour that's the cutting edge of intelligence. Not to mention sly skinny music, not to mention sheer metaphorical pounce, moves that accomplish themselves before you realise they're underway - Karen Solie's work reminds me that there is at the heart of metaphor a delicious amoral joy, that raw irrepressible humour often personified in the trickster which kicks in no matter how "painful" or "depressing" the subject. -- Don McKay
Solie's language is blistered, contagious; a level-eyed, machine-age ecstasy, tempered by circumstance, where "Lions lie with lambs in the rusted box of a half-ton". At times trapped in a furious Now, at others gorgeously elegiac, Short Haul Engine is a truer music of consciousness for its shifts and confusions, a music wrenched from the what's-there, for the "overbuilt" and "jerry-rigged". Let the world revolve around the badlands awhile. -- Ken Babstock