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