Skeena

An elegy to and celebration of British Columbia's second-longest river, one at the centre of contemporary conversations about resource extraction and northern geographies, SKEENA is an assemblage of voices, stories and histories both about the river and from the river's perspective. As a single poetic narrative spanning more than eighty pages, this second collection of poetry by award-winning poet Sarah de Leeuw follows a Canadian tradition of long poems, weaving together poetic rendering of the river's perceptions with archival material that includes highway signs and historical newspapers, scientific reports and local lore, geological surveys and topographic maps. Mirroring a river's complex tributary structure and rendered in highly concentrated imagistic language and experimental description, SKEENA is a poly-vocal watershed of poetry, a book that unflinchingly demands humans understand the power of a river, the life and world of the Skeena River.

Sarah de Leeuw is the author of five literary books and co-editor of two academic texts. She is the winner of the 2013 Dorothy Livesay Award for poetry and a two-time recipient of a CBC Literary Award for creative non-fiction, and in 2014 won a Western Magazine Gold Award for the best article published that year in British Columbia. With a Ph.D. in geography, de Leeuw works in a faculty of medicine where she teaches and undertakes research on medical humanities and health inequalities. Her creative and academic work has been widely anthologized and appears in journals from CV2 and PRISM INTERNATIONAl to the CANADIAN GEOGRAPHER and EMOTION, SPACE AND SOCIETY. Having grown up and spent most of her life in Northern BC, including Haida Gwaii and Terrace, she now divides her time between Prince George and Kelowna.