• Once a Murderer

Once a Murderer

by Zoë Landale

April 1, 2008 | ISBN 978-1-894987-23-3 | 96 Pages

Find at your local bookstore (Canada).

Find at your local book seller (Indiebound USA).

Regular price $17.00 CAD
Shipping calculated at checkout.
Format
Added to Cart! View cart or continue shopping.

A gritty, original collection on a subject rarely addressed: the surprising affinities between crime and poetry. To gather material for a mystery novel, Landale accompanied RCMP officers on patrol. In Once a Murderer, the novel's protagonist has stepped out of prose fiction into poetry that is consuming and seductive. A running subversive commentary on love, crime and poetry appears in the margins, giving depth and flesh to the voices.

    • Review (Anne Burke, Feminist Caucus, 02/05/2014)
      Anne Burke summarizes and quotes from Once a Murderer
    • Poetry Review for the Year 2008 (Ryan Melson, Journal of Canadian Poetry Volume 25, 2/1/2011)
      "Overall, Landale’s intertwining of personal lives with their linguistic construction is simultaneously harrowing and fascinating; reading Once makes it clear why she won the poetry prize for the CBC literary competition.”
    • Of verse and violent crime (Barbara Carey, The Toronto Star, 6/8/2008)
      “In the collection's best poems, Landale links crime and illicit sex – intimacy and guilt … also bond cop and perp; interrogation and seduction are both forms of manipulation.”
    • Editor's choice: 8 recommended titles from recent releases (The Vancouver Sun, 6/7/2008)
      "Zoë Landale teaches writing at Kwantlen Polytechnic University. This book of poetry, a response to the violence around us, draws on her experiences accompanying RCMP officers on patrol. Poem titles include 'Ways to Identify Bad Guys,' 'Ways to Catch a Murderer,' 'How to Kill a Cop" and "How to Kill a Civilian'."

  • Zoë Landale's writing has appeared in over thirty anthologies and her fiction, creative nonfiction and poetry has won signficant awards, including first prize for poetry in the CBC Literary Competition. Einstein’s Cat is her seventh book. She also edited, with Luanne Armstrong, Slice Me Some Truth: An anthology of Canadian creative nonfiction, which was published by Wolsak and Wynn in 2011. Her work has appeared in numerous literary journals and magazines including The New Quarterly, CV2, The Antigonish Review, The Malahat Review, Chatelaine, and Canadian Living. She is a member of the Writer's Union of Canada and the Federation of BC Writers. Landale lives in British Columbia where she is a faculty member of the Creative Writing Department at Kwantlen Polytechnic University.