Outside Magic

In 1997, poet Noah Leznoff delighted readers and critics with his debut collection Why We Go to Zoos. Now, one of the most enjoyable voices in Canadian poetry to have emerged in the 1990s returns with a riveting new collection, and it's voice that's speaking loud and clear. In Outside Magic, the poet answers difficult questions -- questions about love and politics, about our public selves and domestic spaces, questions for which the answers have long been taken for granted -- but Leznoff's answers are not always what we expect. Alive with a multiplicity of voices and wrought with remarkable technical versatility, these poems take us outside our convenient assumptions and transcendental connections; outside the illusions of certainty, the sleight of hand of our social vocabulary and the mysteries of our civil existence -- in short, these poems take us outside magic.