• Title: outskirts
• Author: Sue Goyette
• ISBN: 1-926829-68-9
• ISBN-13: 978-1-926829-68-5
• Pages: 112
• Year: 2011
• Size: 6" × 8.75"
• Price: $19.00

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Winner of the 2012 Pat Lowther Memorial Award

Winner of the 2012 Atlantic Poetry Prize

A powerful diptych juxtaposing our rootedness in family love with a report from the precipice of planetary disintegration.

Sue Goyette’s outskirts is a tour de force. Its originality lies in Goyette’s refusal of despair, her conviction that the connections among people, their conversation, curiosity, empathy and awe, can help us see a way forward. Her aim is to find energy in human love, a way to walk the darkness rather than hide from it. This book will name you, and frighten you; make you laugh, and arm you for what is to come.

…Leave the gossip to the rivers.  Photographs will be buried at the base of diseased trees.  All eyes are distractible, smiles are especially alluring.  The sump-pump

can't get rid of the water and god, I am told, is a canoe-shaped hole in all of us.  Books, those old grandmothers, are losing their teeth.  Stay focused.  Those aren't stars, they're

flashlights.  Add, don't divide.  Love best those who have forgotten how.  There are no favorites in this dark.  Now scatter. 

-- from “Resist”

“One of the best poets writing today in Canada, Susan Goyette proves herself at the height of her powers in outskirts. In these magnificent multi-part poems, she fuses genealogical time with geological time and revels in paradoxes. Ranging from the dynamics of families, to bad guests at dinner parties, to lovers and loved ones, and on to deeply moving and terrifying images of erosion and clear cutting, Goyette harnesses the expected to the absurd. As she creates synapses from the personal to the global, Canada itself becomes a character with a voice. With its zesty wordplay and its wrenching of the “eco” from the “logical,” outskirts is both a book and a reckoning. Goyette is candid, clairvoyant, and rescuing in her vision.”  – Molly Peacock

“These poems are all about people – the quick-winged emotions passing between people, love’s claws, love’s rock slides, the heart’s narrow escapes.  Goyette peels back the surface of the familiar human world to reveal the forest-world mysteries, the shape shifting, the glories and agonies truly at play there.  Domestic and shamanic, these open-hearted poems are filled with the lift of discovery and insight.  They stir up language, kindle emotion and appetite.”  – John Steffler

Second printing

In Conversation / Poetry & Poetics - Susan Goyette & Susan Gillis

Susan, a lesson in awesomeness (part 8) - Sarah Tsiang interviews Sue Goyette at Open Book: Toronto

Pat Lowther Memorial Award: The Pat Lowther Memorial Award is given for a book of poetry by a Canadian woman published in the preceding year, and is in memory of the late Pat Lowther, whose career was cut short by her untimely death in 1975. The award carries a $1,000 prize. 2012 Jury: Katherine Bitney, Sarah Klassen, Nela Rio - The winner is outskirts by Sue Goyette (Brick Books)

Judges’ Comments: Sue Goyette’s poems are immediately inviting. She brings to her work a confident voice, fresh conversational language, energetic narrative style and a sure rhythms. Her unflinching attention to both the fraught territory of family life and the wider realm of the natural world garners material rich in tension and vitality. The resulting poems do not harangue, but speak with conviction, intelligence and a compassion so genuine the reader feels awed and implicated. Soaring above the details of description, narrative and imagery, these poems consistently demonstrate the clarity and wisdom of the poet’s vision and her mature craftsmanship.

Bio: Sue Goyette has published two books of poems, The True Names of Birds (Brick Books) and Undone (Brick Books), and has been nominated for the Governor General’s award, the Pat Lowther Award, the Plantos/Acron Award for Poetry and the Dartmouth Book Award. Her novel, Lures (HarperCollins), was short-listed for the Thomas Head Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award. She teaches creative writing at Dalhousie University. She also participates in the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia’s Mentorship and Writers in Schools programs and has taught at Sage Hill, the Banff Centre Wired Writing Studio and the Blue Heron Workshop.

Best of Halifax 2012 - Reader's Choice Awards - outskirts by Sue Goyette - bronze winner for Best Book

get out of the way of writing the poem – new interview of Sue Goyette by Joanne Merriam – April 15, 2012 here.

Prairie Fire contest winners - Sue Goyette wins first prize in the 2011 Banff Centre Bliss Carman Poetry Award for a sequence titled "fashion". - This winning entry will appear in the summer 2012 issue of Prairie Fire.

Interesting interview with Sue Goyette at Salty Ink (February 7, 2012). Read it here .

ABT's Proust Questionnaire with Sue Goyette - from Atlantic Books Today, fall 2011 here

Words of Wisdom - Advice All Writers Should Take - from Atlantic Books Today, fall 2011 here

Poet Sue Goyette on good editors and tofu - Poet, novelist and past CBC Literary Award winner Sue Goyette explains why a good poetry editor needs to soak up the flavour of what's around her.  Here's the full article.

Sue Goyette’s “The New Mothers” awarded 2010 Earle Birney Poetry Prize.  Each year the outgoing Each year, the outgoing poetry editor of PRISM international chooses the winning poem. Check out what outgoing PRISM poetry editor Liz Ross had to say about Sue’s poem here.

Sue Goyette nominated for the National Magazine Awards 2011 for poetry – Disrupted; Recession; Fog: Forgotten Names Begin Their Journey Home – which appeared in Fiddlehead and are included in her new poetry collection outskirts. - The Gold, Silver and Honourable Mention awards will be announced in Toronto on June 10, at the 34^th annual National Magazine Awards gala, presented by CDS Global. Full list of nominations

Writing Recipes with SUE GOYETTE – Sue Goyette is in the Book Fridge - an interview with Sue about writing and teaching. Read it here.

Why Should We Read Sue Goyette? - (Introduction for her Saint Mary’s University Reading – Feb. 7, 2012– all quotations from Outskirts or Undone) - prepared by Brian Bartlett. Read it here.