When the World is Not Our Home includes nearly fifty poems by one of Canada’s most distinctive literary voices. Selected from titles published between 1985 and 2000, these poems illustrate an agile poet sifting the everyday through a fine mythical screen. They reveal a woman with multiple roles, and her emergence as a highly sought-after Canadian poet.
Known for her rebellious voice, Musgrave knots sensual with mischief, girlhood with ritual, and parental with horrific. Cacophonous imagery engages through an exquisite language and what it describes: family faltering into drug addiction, infidelity, and death. Musgrave positions the reader in “the thin membrane between self and world”, and it is in this space that she provokes us with her gripping imagination.
“Musgrave approaches her subject in the manner of Salvador Dali – she distorts reality until it approximates her bizarre vision of the world.”
– The Globe and Mail
“Tapping into fears and subconscious yearnings has been Susan Musgrave’s trademark from her earliest work, Songs of the Sea Witch, where she found inspiration and direction in classical and aboriginal mythology. Now she is able to locate the mythic element anywhere, in a death, a ferry ride, a failed photographic expedition, even in reading someone else’s collected poems! ” – BC Bookworld
