Apple Thieves

‘ I’ ve always loved paintings that offer glimpses of ordinary people in rooms that open to other rooms,’ Beverley Bie Brahic says. Apple Thieves is full of such painterly moments, remembered or caught on the fly. ‘ Why this moment, not another one?’ she asks in ‘ Root Vegetables,’ one of several poems about human migrations, ‘ Was famine too abstract for the children we were?’ Today her peripatetic life finds her at home in Paris among ‘ the pissed-on cornerstones of history/Bells chiming the rich hours of every day,’ or in her husband’ s native Provence. ‘ I love the look in early spring / Of fields turned over,’ she writes in Apple Thieves, whose poems record human fragility, while relishing the earthbound in all its sensuousness: ‘ You should eat it hot,’ ‘ Blackberry Clafoutis’ advises, ‘ Directly from the oven,/But it will still be good/For breakfast, left over’ .

Born in Saskatchewan, Canada, Beverley Bie Brahic grew up in Vancouver. Apple Thieves is her fifth collection of poetry after Catch and Release, winner of the 2019 Wigtown Book Festival Alistair Reid Pamphlet Prize; The Hotel Eden; The Hunting of the Boar, a 2016 PBS Recommendation; White Sheets, a 2013 Forward Prize finalist for Best Collection and PBS Recommendation; and Against Gravity. Her many translations include books by Yves Bonnefoy, Hé lè ne Cixous and Charles Baudelaire. She has received a Canada Council for the Arts Writing Grant.