Live Ones

“With the prismatic eye of a witch-blessed Alden Nowlan, Sadie McCarney sculpts a hard-won beauty into the passion of her lines. ” —Marilyn Bowering, author of Threshold and The Alchemy of Happiness Sadie McCarney’s first full-length poetry collection grapples with mourning, coming of age, and queer identity against the backdrop of rural and small-town Atlantic Canada. Ranging from pellet-gunned backyard butterflies to a chorus of encroaching ghosts, Live Ones celebrates the personal and idiosyncratic aspects of death, seeing them as intimately wedded to lives well-lived. Personal myth-making collides with grocery shopping, ancient history turns out to be alive and well in modern-day Milford, Nova Scotia, and the complexities of queer female desire call out to us from beyond the grave.