Apple Thieves

'I am drawn to paintings that catch glimpses of ordinary people in rooms that lead to other rooms,' Beverley Bie Brahic says. Apple Thieves is full of such painterly moments, remembered or caught on the fly, with their charge of mystery, like this shell – 'an empty house / a nudge will set rocking / almost indefinitely' – collected on the coast of her native British Columbia, whose diverse populations and their migrations she evokes in 'Root Vegetables'. Today, long resident in France, she relishes Paris – 'Smelling of piss and baking bread / The city in its glory and dereliction' – 'time-hedged cottages' and the earthbound in all its fragility.

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.