Deepwater Vee

A stunning poetic debut that explores some of Canada's most threatened waterways — places both altered and untamed — and tracks their currents of history and myth.

Melanie Siebert's first collection travels many remote northern rivers, but also through two of Canada's most damaged waterways — the Athabasca, which runs through the heart of the Alberta tar sands, and the North Saskatchewan, the river Siebert grew up alongside, one stressed by dams and upgraders, sewage and pesticides. These rivers push the poems into a contemplation of loss and into the terrain of Alexander MacKenzie's dreams, a busker's broken-down street riffs, and the dream-world wanderings of a grandmother who returns to inhabit the earth. Here boundaries blur — between the self and the other, between the living and the dead, between the human and the wild — and loss carries with it both music and silence.