Tammy Armstrong has made the longlist for the 2017 CBC Poetry Prize longlist for Hermit God Spot.

Tammy Armstrong has published two novels and four books of poetry. Most recently, she has published the poetry collection The Scare in the Crow. She lives on Nova Scotia's south shore.

Rural, dramatic monologues, strangeness, mid-winter

"Some time ago, my mother told me about a man living in an abandoned barn not far from her home in northeastern Maine. He was only discovered, mid-winter, because things had gone missing from neighbouring properties and someone had tracked his footprints in the snow. Soon after, I heard about another man who claimed to have been living undetected in the Maine woods for over twenty years. These two wintery ghosts became one in my thinking of what it might mean to exist unseen, especially during such an unforgiving season. What does it mean to walk into the woods and fields and just... disappear?"

Out there
Chernobyl's fallout inked
​ across western Soviet
while halfway between Belmont and Freedom, Maine
​I chinned the car
​until the gas gave out
​ where a wallowed dirt track thinned
​exposing its rigging and pits.