Karen Connelly’s fourth collection of poetry is remarkable in its energy, courage, and resounding depth. Connelly is a poet rare in her ability to address the political from within the realm of personal experience. Moving among the haunted refugees and political dissidents on the Thai-Burmese border, retelling the stories of Greek peasants, negotiating the borders between home and exile, Connelly brings to all her poetry a passion for being fully alive, engaged with the world as both participant and witness. By turns richly metaphorical, sensual, and chilling, The Border Surrounds Us is Karen Connelly’s most accomplished and vibrant book to date.

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“Here is an authentic voice, the voice of a born poet.…”
–Atlantic Books Today

“Experiences, landscapes, and intimacies have been rendered in exhilarating, sensuous movements with language so lush, voices so vibrant, and rhythms so resonant that the poems often seem to read, even perform, themselves.… Connelly has wrought searing poetry.”
–Canadian Literature

“Poems that are as swift and dangerous, sometimes, as the speedy and adventurous life from which they’ve been flung, or have flown off, like ballast or birds, just that varied in weight and trajectory and function.”
–Don Coles

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Karen Connelly has published four books of poems, The Small Words in My Body (1990), which received the 1990 Pat Lowther Award, This Brighter Prison: A Book of Journeys (1993), The Disorder of Love (1997); and, most recently, The Border Surrounds Us (2000); and two works of non-fiction, One Room in a Castle: Letters from Spain, France, & Greece (1995), and the national bestseller Touch the Dragon: A Thai Journal (1992), which won the Governor General’s Award for Non-fiction, making her the youngest person to have won the prize in any of the English-language categories. Born in Calgary, Alberta, she now lives on Vancouver Island and in Greece.

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