Nothing You Can Carry is rooted in a keen, even holy, sense of place within the natural world. Today that place is haunted by anxiety over a precarious present and a darker future. These poems take an honest, sometimes ironic and sometimes broken-hearted look at how the self and society are implicated in our climate crisis and the systemic complexities surrounding it. Yet life goes on. The collection moves through environmental fears and spills into all the areas that absorb the self – memory, story, family, love. These poems are vivid and vulnerable, humorous and emotional. They summon the deeper mysteries of being human in a world that is increasingly separate from the sacred.

Alexander's poetry is specific, local, and universal at the same time. Her images are powerful and her language honed to the elemental common denominators of land, water, and sky, and the natural forces that exist in these elements. (From Thistledown Press)

Susan Alexander is a poet from British Columbia. Her work has been featured on the bus in Vancouver's Poetry in Transit. She won the 2016 Short Grain poetry prize and the 2015 Vancouver Writers' Festival Contest. She was longlisted for the 2018 CBC Poetry Prize.