Selected Poems II: 1976-1986

Margaret Atwood is known primarily as a novelist, but her prose poetry is often stunning, and just as biting as her fiction. This collection encompasses women, nature, death, war, violence, the human condition, and even space travel. Every poem is worth reading and re-reading.

Short excerpt:

The blood goes through your neck veins with a noise they call singing.
Time shatters like bad glass; you are the pinpoint of it.

Your feet rotting inside your boots, the skin of your chest
festering under the zippers, the waterproof armor,

you sit here, on the hill, a vantage point, at this X or scuffling
in the earth, which they call a nest. Who chose that word?

Whatever you are you are not an egg, or a bird either.
Vipers perhaps is what was meant. Who show more cares now?

That is the main question: who cares. Not these pieces of paper
from somewhere known as home you fold, unread, in your pocket.

-- From "Machine. Gun. Nest", p. 137 show less

When i read the poetry of Margaret Atwood she express thoughts i have never been able to put words to. That is her genius. That i have found her is mine.