Deepwater Vee by Melanie Siebert

A stunning poetic debut that explores some of Canada’s most threatened waterways—places both altered and untamed—and tracks their currents of history and myth.

Melanie Siebert’s first collection travels many remote northern rivers, but also through two of Canada’s most damaged waterways—the Athabasca, which runs through the heart of the Alberta tar sands, and the North Saskatchewan, the river Siebert grew up alongside, one stressed by dams and upgraders, sewage and pesticides. These rivers push the poems into a contemplation of loss and into the terrain of Alexander MacKenzie’s dreams, a busker’s broken-down street riffs, and the dream-world wanderings of a grandmother who returns to inhabit the earth. Here boundaries blur—between the self and the other, between the living and the dead, between the human and the wild—and loss carries with it both music and silence.

Story Locale: Alberta and Saskatchewan

Publication History: Trade Paperback Original

MELANIE SIEBERT recently completed an MFA at the University of Victoria with a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Fellowship. Her writing has been broadcast on CBC Radio and published in such literary journals as The Malahat Review, Event, Prairie Fire, and in Half in the Sun, an anthology of contemporary Mennonite writing. She has been a wilderness guide on remote northern rivers from Alaska to Baffin Island for more than ten years. (Author photo: Rob Skelly)

Author Residence: Victoria, B.C.

Author Hometown: Saskatchewan

9780771080333
Paperback , Trade
English
General Trade
Mar 30, 2010