Kids in Triage

From the winner of the 2010 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award comes a remarkable debut poetry collection. In a culture that is at once desensitized by the media while it fetishizes fear and outrage, how can we talk about emergencies, both public and private in a way that still communicates their horrors, in a way that still matters? Kilby Smith-McGregor answers this question with a dizzying range of voices animated by desire, humour, pleasure and grief.

This is poetry that strikes a balance between baroque elegance and haunting understatement. In it we witness the horror of spontaneous human combustion, as well as the awkwardness of swimming lessons; the precision of code breaking, as well as the disorder of hard drinking. Effortlessly combining the languages of myth, medicine and metaphysics, Kids in Triage is rich in vivid language and arresting images, a multi-faceted feast for the imagination.