This is How It is

By Sharon King-Campbell

***THE MIRAMICHI READER'S VERY BEST BOOK AWARDS, POETRY: LONGLIST***

Illuminating, poised, and wholly original, the poems of Sharon King-Campbell’s This Is How It Is range across the planet from New Zealand to Thailand to Newfoundland, gathering along the way voices both historical and mythological in a compelling display of dramatic empathy and poetic imagination. Subverting history and fable while always returning to vividly depicted images of our landscapes within the specter of environmental crisis, King-Campbell spans the far corners of the earth and the previously silent voices of our collective pasts to arrive here at our contemporary moment with poems of formal dexterity as prescient as they are captivating.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Breakwater Books
• Release date: Apr 19, 2021
• ISBN: 9781550818703

Sharon King-Campbell

Sharon King-Campbell is a theatre and literary artist based in Ktaqmkuk, colonially known as Newfoundland. She was the 2017 recipient of the Rhonda Payne Award, was longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2020, and is a four-time winner of the Arts and Letters Awards in fiction, dramatic script, and poetry. Her collection of poetry, This Is How It Is, was published in 2021. Her plays Original and Give Me Back have reached audiences throughout Newfoundland and Labrador and mainland Canada. 

Book preview

I am raw as a split fish, insides

outside, and the salt – preserves – but

I’m alive, don’t you see? I

can breathe the air. The centre of a

traitor’s punishment, guts

everywhere. And here

the crows are coming

FOR A WETLAND

We came up with fairies to explain

landscapes like this: a pond,

a ridge of one-stone islands crossing it.

To mark the path, a winding stand

of birch on either side, their roots submerged

and wrapped around the rock. Follow

the aisle through the lake’s cathedral. Find

an apse of tangled branches overhead. Landscapes

like this require invention, intervention.

A mystical intention. We see wedding arches

in bent bows. We invent this magic, which

doesn’t mean it isn’t real.

if folktales are true

the spiders are the cleverest,

ravens and jackals, foxes

will see right through

their enemies. it’s the

carnivores, mid-chain:

not the prey they capture