Poems about the unexpected and often wry coincidences language lends to life.

In Could be, each poem is a moment of engaged and isolated attention, prodding language, relationships, the mundane aspects of daily life, friendships and art. It asks how we use words, how we shape them and are in turn shaped by them. In many ways, then, this book is about how we construct our world through language, and how language unexpectedly shifts the terms on us. It is wry, funny, moving and at times disturbing. It will quietly assert itself, as so often language itself does, and will challenge readers to reconsider how they engage with words and world.

Fly you, wildbird
half eaten by the smog.
All sheets to the wind. Oh oh
is it laundry day?

                             …We wake up
to the sounds of development.
Is that Mimico Creek
in the washing machine? If you roll over
you’re out of the dream and your anger
can really take shape. Sorry,
I meant passion.

– from “Perpetual Cleanup”

“Heather Cadsby has written a book alive with a quiet urgency, perfectly pitched and intelligently crafted. Her fluency lies in the melding of conceptual and linguistic subtleties that resonates with gravity, insight and a cadenced vitality.” – Don Domanski

“At times whimsical, at times wistful, always wakeful, in Cadsby’s intelligent and mature voice, Mimico Creek hums at the core of this extended aubade to this murmurous, anxious city.” – Dionne Brand