A striking poetic debut that brilliantly illuminates and celebrates the intersection of poetry and science, and the ways they can mediate our discovery of the world and our place in it.
Originating from her living room, backyard garden, university office, or the field sites in boreal or tropical forests, the poems in Madhur Anand’s captivating debut collection compose a lyric science; they bring order and chaos together into a unified theory of predicting catastrophes, large and small. Anand’s ecologist poetics are sophisticated and original; her voice is an “index,” a way of cataloguing and measuring the world and human experience, and of illuminating the interconnectedness at the heart of all things. Narrating the beauty of her perceived world, the poems unabashedly embrace the scintillant language of scientific evidence as they interrogate crises of personal and global concern. The result is a poetry that is as complex as it is compassionate. Anand’s modernist intervention into “nature” poetry is a sparkling addition to poetics in Canada and beyond.
SHORTLIST
| 2016 Trillium Book Award
“In Madhur Anand’s poems the ancient false dichotomy between art and science collapses, and does so with such grace, wit, and élan you’d think this had been its purpose all along. These poems are alive with the potency of their own hybrid attentions – rapt, nimble, and capable of unlocking the energies asleep in eco-scientific jargon as well as popular culture and the poet’s Indian heritage. Here is a writing full of linguistic and conceptual verve, essential reading for all of us interested in poetry and the ecological arts.” —Don McKay, Griffin Poetry Prize–winning author of Strike/Slip
"Anand's exquisitely crafted debut poetry collection combines scientific, observational, socially conscious, haunting and reflexively personal, and almost Romantic strains into a cohesive, captivating whole. . . . [A] seemingly effortless, deeply humanist sleight of hand. . . . Anand's attention to and ability to evoke explicit, exponential beauty in scientific and natural form are simply stunning. . . . Anand's debut is in every measure a triumph." —Publishers Weekly
MADHUR ANAND's debut book of creative non-fiction This Red Line Goes Straight to Your Heart (2020) won the Governor General's Literary Award for Nonfiction. Her debut collection of poems A New Index for Predicting Catastrophes (2015) was a finalist for the Trillium Book Award for Poetry and named one of 10 all-time "trailblazing" poetry collections by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Her second collection of poems Parasitic Oscillations (2022) was also a finalist for the Trillium Book Award for Poetry and named a Globe and Mail Top 100 Book. To Place a Rabbit is her first novel. Anand is a professor and the director of the Global Ecological Change and Sustainability Laboratory at the University of Guelph, Ontario.
View titles by Madhur Anand
A striking poetic debut that brilliantly illuminates and celebrates the intersection of poetry and science, and the ways they can mediate our discovery of the world and our place in it.
Originating from her living room, backyard garden, university office, or the field sites in boreal or tropical forests, the poems in Madhur Anand’s captivating debut collection compose a lyric science; they bring order and chaos together into a unified theory of predicting catastrophes, large and small. Anand’s ecologist poetics are sophisticated and original; her voice is an “index,” a way of cataloguing and measuring the world and human experience, and of illuminating the interconnectedness at the heart of all things. Narrating the beauty of her perceived world, the poems unabashedly embrace the scintillant language of scientific evidence as they interrogate crises of personal and global concern. The result is a poetry that is as complex as it is compassionate. Anand’s modernist intervention into “nature” poetry is a sparkling addition to poetics in Canada and beyond.
Awards
SHORTLIST
| 2016 Trillium Book Award
Praise
“In Madhur Anand’s poems the ancient false dichotomy between art and science collapses, and does so with such grace, wit, and élan you’d think this had been its purpose all along. These poems are alive with the potency of their own hybrid attentions – rapt, nimble, and capable of unlocking the energies asleep in eco-scientific jargon as well as popular culture and the poet’s Indian heritage. Here is a writing full of linguistic and conceptual verve, essential reading for all of us interested in poetry and the ecological arts.” —Don McKay, Griffin Poetry Prize–winning author of Strike/Slip
"Anand's exquisitely crafted debut poetry collection combines scientific, observational, socially conscious, haunting and reflexively personal, and almost Romantic strains into a cohesive, captivating whole. . . . [A] seemingly effortless, deeply humanist sleight of hand. . . . Anand's attention to and ability to evoke explicit, exponential beauty in scientific and natural form are simply stunning. . . . Anand's debut is in every measure a triumph." —Publishers Weekly
MADHUR ANAND's debut book of creative non-fiction This Red Line Goes Straight to Your Heart (2020) won the Governor General's Literary Award for Nonfiction. Her debut collection of poems A New Index for Predicting Catastrophes (2015) was a finalist for the Trillium Book Award for Poetry and named one of 10 all-time "trailblazing" poetry collections by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Her second collection of poems Parasitic Oscillations (2022) was also a finalist for the Trillium Book Award for Poetry and named a Globe and Mail Top 100 Book. To Place a Rabbit is her first novel. Anand is a professor and the director of the Global Ecological Change and Sustainability Laboratory at the University of Guelph, Ontario.
View titles by Madhur Anand
