This rare achievement combines formal mastery with honesty and vulnerability.

—Jurors, Governor General’s Award for Poetry

MacAskill’s poetry is haunted. She finds language in a void, movement in stillness, and creates a lexicon for articulating her losses. Much like [Pierre] Nepveu, MacAskill’s work is a powerful exploration of what it means to survive—in language, in life, in familial love. […] Both masterful poets look to the translative, enduring qualities of poetry as both a way through grief and a way to immortalize love.

—Emily Mernin, Canadian Notes & Queries

From the opening lines (“The tulips give up the ghosts / of themselves, their petals supple boats / on my window ledge and table”) to the closing (“but the centre of you / was white and blue / a star”), this is a lyric collection in the most literal sense of the word: melodic, rhythmic, finely tuned, a pleasure to hear aloud even if you discount all of its other qualities. That the book is simultaneously emotionally devastating (as when the speaker says to her unborn child “there you were / shuddering / into the toilet bowl”), culturally resonant (“Priam / is to eat before he wails, / as Niobe attended to her own body / before returning”) and formally and tonally surprising (“SMEAR THAT FERTILE PULP / ON MY FACE O PRIEST”), makes it a nearly perfect book.

—Jade Wallace, CAROUSEL Magazine