The Rapids

Poetry. Urgent and precarious, the poems in THE RAPIDS, Susan Gillis' third collection, take us to places lost and reclaimed: a balcony high over the St. Lawrence River in downtown Montreal, upstream to the Lachine Rapids, and beyond, to landscapes as far apart as Greece and the B.C. coast.

The presiding spirit of the book is force: wind, water, and time at work on the body and on the body of the world. Like the river that is its measure, THE RAPIDS is full of sudden shifts--a polyphony of surges and eddies and remarkable leaps.

THE RAPIDS, Susan Gillis' ravishing new collection, gives us the strange loops of ordinary moments: a farewell at a train station, an empty room, the first bloodroot in spring. Her poems--airy, shimmering--reveal a slippage in time and space. We are not where we thought we were--not at all.--Anne Simpson