A startling and hip new collection of poetry from a dual American/Canadian citizen who's already making waves on the literary scene.


Suzannah Showler's bracing, intense second collection is equal parts cultural critique and phenomenological investigation. Building on the enlightened skepticism of her much-praised debut, Thing Is puts the hashtag age through some much-needed paces. Witty, cutting, heartbroken and cautiously hopeful, these poems are really about "aboutness," about what it means to be alive right now. They also nimbly advance the longstanding poetic argument for the value of considered attention: "What follows from / what you know is / not the same thing / as knowledge. Even / when you get it right."

SUZANNAH SHOWLER is the author of Most Dramatic Ever, a book of cultural criticism about The Bachelor (ECW, 2018), and the poetry collections Thing Is (McClelland & Stewart, 2017) and Failure to Thrive (ECW, 2014). You can read her work in the New York Times Magazine, Slate, The Walrus, Hazlitt, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among other places. She is the poetry editor for Maisonneuve. She also does contingent labour teaching creative writing. She currently lives on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded land of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) Nations with her partner, Andrew Battershill.