Breathtaking new poetry by the author of The Cottage Builder’s Letter

In this brilliantly evoked new gathering of poems, George Murray creates a strange and menacing world, pulsating with sensory intensity. These poems don’t just inquire, they demand answers, and go seeking them through the realms of the past, the present, and the future. Here are stories and images that challenge, threaten, and fascinate by their dreamlike clarity, flickering through kaleidoscopic changes and throwing off resonant statements like sparks. “On either side of awe,” as Murray puts it in these innovative new poems, “stand horror and reverence.” Events and figures emerge swiftly out of one another in a landscape partly a futuristic or ancient wasteland, partly the generous earth we know. The collection as a whole forms a saga, moving from contemporary damage toward the possibilities – disaster? recovery? – that always exist “in the few moments we have under the sky.”

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I began writing The Hunter in early 2001. The noise and bustle of New York City were breaking my concentration and leaving me mentally drained. My fragmented thoughts began to coalesce and The Hunter emerged as part of an emotional response to

“an age that has killed emergency,
when stakes of destruction
have been jacked so high no one

can match the ante.”

The broken, post-(or pre-)cataclysmic landscape of The Hunter existed before the events of that fall, but poems written subsequently were subtly affected by the disaster and took the book in new directions.

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“There is a beauty within the poetic language.…This beauty is what makes The Hunter a compelling read. At this watershed moment in history, we are all looking for the beauty that lies somewhere beneath the ugliness of history and the ominous tone of prophecy.”
–Quill & Quire


“He has the poet’s instinct, the knack for turning a good phrase and the verbal grit and suppleness to keep the reader engaged. . . . An important talent.”
–National Post

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Read an excerpt

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George Murray’s four books of poetry are Carousel, The Cottage Builder’s Letter, The Hunter, and, most recently, The Rush to Here. His work has appeared in many newspapers and magazines in Canada, and in the U.S. and Australia, including Descant, The Iowa Review, The Globe and Mail, Jacket, Mid-American Review, Nerve, Painted Bride Quarterly, and Slope. He is a contributing editor with Maisonneuve Magazine and editor of Bookninja.com. Raised in rural Ontario, he now lives in St. John’s.

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