Melanie Siebert's stunning debut collection travels remote northern rivers, as well as two of Canada's most threatened rivers, the Athabasca and the North Saskatchewan. These rivers push the poems into a contemplation of loss and into the terrain of Alexander Mackenzie's dreams, a busker's broken-down street riffs, and the borderland wanderings of a grandmother whose absence is felt as a presence. The poems' currents are turbulent, braided, submerged. Narrative streams appear like tributaries glimpsed through brush, and then veer into unexpected territories, where boundaries blur – between the self and the other, between the living and the dead, between the human and the wild – and loss carries with it both music and silence. In this virtuoso collection, Melanie Siebert has transformed language into that rarest thing, a singular poetic vision. (McClelland & Stewart)