Wellwater

An essential writer: anyone remotely interested in 21st-century literature, or 21st-century life, should read her … Her writing swerves from gritty to sublime, philosophical to street-smart. Solie is not merely influenced by the great mid-century Americans; she is their equal – a modern great – Tristram Fane Saunders * Telegraph *
An almost unreasonably wonderful book … Solie is a brilliant cartographer of the feckless and the careless, of the ways in which inhumanity has an impact on the minutiae of our daily lives … Half-expertise and half-magic … Solie is an exquisite phrasemaker, analogist, blender of idioms, aphorist – and all these overlapping gifts create images, phrases, whole poems that take your breath away … Wellwater is a terrifying book – and a masterly one. Solie, for me, is as good as poetry gets – Declan Ryan * Telegraph *
Her expansive, talkative lines unpack tight domestic spaces jam-packed with childhood memories as well as the awesome vistas of vast, dust-filled Canadian landscapes. Sometimes didactic and anecdotal, always matter-of-fact, Solie is a philosophical conversationalist … This is a well-timed book addressing our moment of climatic turbulence – Kit Fan * Observer *
Karen Solie should be read wherever English is spoken – Michael Hofmann * London Review of Books *
Moving from portraits of her youth in rural Saskatchewan to the insidious creep of climate change, Wellwater is tender, poignant and full of exquisite, Bishop-esque images. Poetry doesn’t get much more beautiful – Books of the Year * Telegraph *
A poet of the modern, cross-country journey * Guardian *
Karen Solie is a star of Canadian poetry – Ange Mlinko * New York Review of Books *
Perfect, intense little miracles of power and craft … Wellwater is an enjoyable and impressive collection – Graeme Richardson * The Times *
Karen Solie’s Wellwater is brilliant - one of my favourite collections of recent times. Blending the incompatible lexicons of the corporate and the non-human, Solie denaturalises the schemas of land and property ownership, rendering strange that which is all too frequently taken to be normal. A wry and buoyant playfulness walks a tightrope with frank appraisal, as Solie details our growing alienation to the natural world. The result is a work of political profundity and linguistic dexterity that constantly surprises – Susannah Dickey, PEN Heaney Prize-winning author of ISDAL and Tennis Lessons
Gritty, unsentimental truthtelling with elegance and authority – Rachel Hadas, Books of the Year * Times Literary Supplement *
A stunning piece of work – Books of the Year * Financial Times *
Deeply philosophical … Lines that fall on the ear like a guilty pleasure … Erudite and magnificent * Irish Times *
Those of us who live by poetry look forward, with a famished sort of envy, to a book by Karen Solie … Solie may be the great philosopher-poet of the bewildered, de-wilded West … Every poem is quotable … Perfectly judged. – Camille Ralphs * The Tablet *
[Solie] turns her attention to a landscape or scene, applying her intelligence and observational skills until she uncovers a profound truth. Solie’s honesty can cut through the cant we often call poetry with moments of sudden, stunning clarity – Clare Pollard * Poetry Review *
In Wellwater, Solie returns to themes long central to her poetry, landscape, labour, and inequality but with a deepened emotional resonance. The collection charts how age, loss, and mourning alter not only the self but the very shape of language. As she notes, the line between elegy and ode is often barely there, and her poems move deftly between lament and praise, between clarity and ambiguity. – Sarah Hall, Lisa Kelly, Hannah Lavery, Sean O’Brien, and Rommi Smith, 2025 Forward Prize judges
Sharptongued, generous, funny, Solie’s poems burst with energy – Beverley Bie Brahic, Books of the Year * Times Literary Supplement *
Karen Solie has (quietly) long been one of the best poets writing in English. Her tremendous new book … represents perhaps a new authority and mastery – A. E. Stallings, Books of the Year * Times Literary Supplement *
Lyrical, humorous, astute, playful – Books of the Year * New Statesman *
Tender, poignant and full of exquisite, Bishop-esque images. Poetry does not get much more beautiful * Telegraph *
Wellwater stands out like the strong Cottonwood trees featured unforgettably in these pages. Dark shimmering poems link our environmental and economic crises alongside childohod memories of rural Canada. These outstanding elegies are so well made, they manage to console us as they chart our earth’s terrible loss – Martina Evans * Irish Times *
Outstanding … The poems of Wellwater come from the whole of an adventurously lived life. They hold the two sentiments, The world is a beautiful place / The world is a terrible place, in perfect equipoise. They offer no happy endings, no salvation in past or future, in epiphany or private happiness. And yet they are anything but grim, with an ironic humour that plays over our increasingly euphemism-hungry culture – Michael Hofmann, Chair of Judges, 2025 T.S. Eliot Prize

Karen Solie was born in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan. She is the author of four previous collections of poems, including Pigeon, which won the Griffin Poetry Prize, the Pat Lowther Award, and the Trillium Award for Poetry. She was International Writer-in-Residence at the University of St Andrews in 2011, and is an Associate Director for the Banff Centre’s Writing Studio programme. Her poems have been published in the US, the UK, Australia, and Europe, and have been translated into French, German, Korean, Hebrew, and Dutch. Her first UK collection, The Living Option: Selected Poems, was published in 2013. She lives in Toronto. Wellwater is her fifth poetry collection.

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