The Description of the World
Johanna Skibsrud
October 2016
88 pages | ISBN 978-1-928088-21-9
**Winner of the 2017 Canadian Authors Association Award for Poetry**
**Winner of the 2017 Fred Cogswell Award for Excellence in Poetry**
**Finalist for the 2017 Pat Lowther Memorial Award**
A new poetry collection from the Giller Prize–winning author of The Sentimentalists and Quartet for the End of Time.
In The Description of the World Johanna Skibsrud brings us to the edges of dreams – and waking. With lines that are searching, but spacious, she deftly turns over ideas of perception and reality, inviting us to join her as she releases the abstract figure from its painting, or brings the poet in from the wilderness. This is a collection about possibility. The possibility of language and naming, of dropping – or not dropping – an atomic bomb, of giving birth, of love.
Reviews
Review (Karen Quevillon, CV2, 01/01/2019)
"With The Description of the World, Skibsrud brings us poems that, given the chance, will unfurl, grow, change and transcend themselves through readers – trailing questions in their wake."
Supreme Fictions and Strange Relations (Nicholas Bradley, Canadian Literature 232, Spring 2017)
"Skibsrud’s wildly associative method is intriguing yet challenging. The book’s twenty-seven poems linger on the theme of the relation of dreams to reality, and of perception to representation."
The Description of the World (Candice James, Canadian Poetry Review, 25/11/2017)
"Johanna Skibsrud is a spacious writer of grand poetic expanse and "The Description of the World" is a landscape of luxurious language and magnificent mood."
"Skibsrud's poetry powered by paradox" (Jonathan Ball, Winnipeg Free Press, 02/25/2017)
"Skibsrud’s poetry is best when it enacts these sorts of paradoxes, when 'eyes see sight, and know it is a wall.' She manages to be both straightforward and convoluted, and her poems have a meditative, thoughtful tone."
"Two from Buckrider 2016: Skibsrud and Harrison" (Catherine Owen, Marrow Reviews, 18/12/2016)
"The Description of the World rather falls apart as an assemblage of poems to me, but nonetheless opens wide essential vistas in the brain where thought is suffused with both deep attention and tenderness."
Excerpt
Click here to read the first section from The Description of the World.
About the Author
Johanna Skibsrud is the author of two previous collections of poetry, I Do Not Think that I Could Love a Human Being and Late Nights With Wild Cowboys; two novels, Quartet for the End of Time and the 2010 Scotiabank Giller Prize–winning novel The Sentimentalists; and the short fiction collection This Will Be Difficult to Explain and Other Stories. An Assistant Professor of English at the University of Arizona, Skibsrud and her family divide their time between Tucson and Cape Breton.
