‘Karen Solie grew up in southwest Saskatchewan’, runs the first line of Solie’s bio, and her poetry is deeply rooted in place. Turning straight from Solie to Diane Seuss’s Modern Poetry, my first impression was that it seemed so peopled. The musicality is both lovely and damning: poetry is an escape into nursery nonsense; a self-soothing gesture like rocking or stimming. But as we have now accepted most readers of poetry also write poetry, perhaps this isn’t the problem it was once considered. Her sixth poetry collection, Lives of the Female Poets, is forthcoming with Bloodaxe in Autumn 2025.