Winner of RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers
Winner of CBC Poetry Prize
Shortlisted for the 2020 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award
Longlisted for the 2020 Pat Lowther Memorial Award
From hybrid bodies to shifting landscapes, Re-Origin of Species blurs the lines of the real. These poems journey through illness and altered states to position disability and madness as evolutionary traits; skilled adaptations aligned with ecological change.
A lyric contemplation of our relationship to the environment, this book looks at the interdependence of species. Weaving personal narratives with a study of the insect kingdom, it draws parallels between human illness, climate change, and the state of peril in the natural world.
Praise for Re-Origin of Species:
In this debut collection of startling beauty, Alessandra Naccarato weaves together the mythological and mundane, the ephemeral and the eternal, into a luminous tapestry of lyric and narrative. Naccarato's shimmering threads illuminate the connections that bind together every living thing on every level of being--from the interpersonal, to the political, to the spiritual. This is exquisite, playful, intentional poetry--and it just might be medicine for us all. --Kai Cheng Thom, author of I HOPE WE CHOOSE LOVE: A Trans Girl's Notes From the End of the World
What a hive of a book--these poems are so urgent, gorgeous, and necessary. Re-Origin of Species is a siren's call and warning siren all at once. --Leah Horlick, author of For Your Own Good
Ranging from the sting of personal loss to navigating landscapes full of promise, Naccarato's poetry interrogates the place where the personal meets the wild. --2015 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award Jury
About the Author: Alessandra Naccarato is a writer based between Salt Spring Island, BC, and Toronto, Ontario. She was the recipient of the 2017 CBC Poetry Prize and the 2015 Bronwen Wallace Award in Poetry from the Writers' Trust of Canada, runner-up for Event Magazine's Creative Non-Fiction Prize, and two-time finalist for the Edna Steabler Personal Essay Prize and Arc Magazine's Poem of Year Contest, as well as the Constance Rooke Creative Non-Fiction Prize, among other recognitions. Alessandra holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia, and her poetry and nonfiction have appeared in literary magazines across Canada, including Room Magazine, EVENT, The New Quarterly, CV2, ARC Poetry Magazine, Poetry Is Dead, and elsewhere. She is the Managing Editor of Write Bloody North Publications, a newly released imprint of Write Bloody Publications (Los Angeles). Re-Origin of Species is her debut poetry collection
