"Gillian Sze is a very good writer. Her voice is intimate and bold and sensual and wise. This is an exceptional debut."
- David Bergen, 2005 Giller Prize Recipient

Fish Bones

**shortlisted for the QWF McAuslan First Book Prize**

April 2009, Poetry, 85 pages
5 x 8, 1-897190-46-8, 978-1-897190-46-3
Paperback $16.95
1-897190-49-2, 978-1-897190-49-4
Hardcover * $31.95

“Fish Bones is a kind of diary dedicated to love–to loving the hurt, unpredictable world, to loving others and one’s own strange life. Gillian Sze’s wide-ranging poems are both boldly honest and magical, modern and rooted in history. Their startling images and insights and their subtle music haunt the reader’s mind for days.”
-John Steffler

In her debut collection, Gillian Sze takes a random walk through the art museum and finds the drama of life framed in a series of powerful and precise artefact poems. Sze’s ekphrastic verse is unrelenting in its commitment to action. each poem follows its own impetus, the origin of which is always a deeply felt encounter, whether aesthetic, familial, erotic, or exotic. vacillating deftly between the suspended space-time of a museum exhibit and the charged urgency of the lives she imagines, Fish Bones is a collection at once stirring and arresting, tender and coolly true.

Read reviews in: Black Heart Magazine, poetryreviews.ca, The Uniter, The Winnipeg Free Press, and Asian Cha.

Fish Bones was on the Bestsellers List at McNally Robinson (Winnipeg) for the week of August 23 and the week of August 30.

Available for order on Amazon and Chapters.