This volume is the first full-length critical study of Karen Solie’s poetry. The book argues that her work develops a distinctive poetics of dwelling: an effort to inhabit a damaged, unstable world through attention, errancy, skepticism, and provisional forms of knowledge. For Solie, attention functions as a kind of spiritual practice, while error, wandering, and uncertainty become necessary modes of perception rather than failures of understanding. The study brings Solie’s poems into conversation with an unusually eclectic range of philosophical, literary, scientific, and cultural contexts that illuminate her work. At the same time, it shows how Solie’s secular practices of observation acquire an increasingly religious force, and how solitude emerges as a crucial condition for an art of ethical and imaginative commitment. Solie’s poetry confronts environmental precarity, metaphysical estrangement, and the limits of language while repeatedly asking what it means to remain attentive, responsive, and alive within a world resistant to closure and human mastery.

Robert Lecker is Greenshields Professor of English at McGill University, Canada, specializing in Canadian literature. He co-edited the journal Essays on Canadian Writing from 1975 to 2004 and was co-publisher of ECW Press from 1977 to 2003. His books include On the Line: Readings in the Short Fiction of Clark Blaise, John Metcalf, and Hugh Hood; Robert Kroetsch; Another I: The Fictions of Clark Blaise; Making It Real: The Canonization of English-Canadian Literature; Dr Delicious: Memoirs of a Life in CanLit; The Cadence of Civil Elegies; Keepers of the Code: English-Canadian Literary Anthologies and the Representation of Nation; and Who Was Doris Hedges? The Search for Canada’s First Literary Agent. He is the editor of Canadian Canons: Essays in Literary Value; Canadian Writers and Their Works; and Do You Want To Be Happy and Write?: Critical Essays on Michael Ondaatje. He received McGill’s H. Noel Fieldhouse Award for Distinguished Teaching, was elected to the Royal Society of Canada in 2012, and received its Lorne Pierce Medal in 2022.