There’s a woman somehow veiled in marble who is only for
me so I take her out of the Art Institute through a back way
and no one notices: she lives with me now, happier than in
the gallery with the cold white lights, in my home she is seen
for who she is, though the veil cannot be removed, its
hardness impenetrable, but now she can be touched.

Acutely Life playfully or sorrowfully interrogates works of art, asking fictional characters their views on grief and generosity. Sue Sorensen’s poems try out poses learned from other poems or wander off with dead artists who insist on entering places they don’t belong.

These quicksilver poems are life studies, or conversations held with all sorts of unsuitable and suitable companions, written in a style full of echoes and dark humour.

Sue Sorensen was born in Saskatchewan, the youngest of seven children, and moved to Winnipeg in 2000. She is the author of a novel, A Large Harmonium (2011), winner of Best First book at the Manitoba Book Awards, and the editor of West of Eden: Essays on Canadian Prairie Literature (2008). In 2014 Sue published the non-fiction study The Collar: Reading Christian Ministry in Fiction, Television, and Film. Her poetry has been published in The New Quarterly, Exile, CV2, Grain, Room, and Prairie Fire. “Blue: Three Sonnets to Mary” won Best Poem in Exile’s 2017 Gwendolyn MacEwen Poetry Competition.

Sue has a PhD from the University of British Columbia. Academic publications range from studies of the novels of A. S. Byatt, Henry James, Ian McEwan, and Guy Vanderhaeghe to biblical illustration, detective fiction, children’s books, rock lyricists, and the filmmaking of Neil Young. She teaches English at Canadian Mennonite University and also serves as the Director of CMU Press.

Sue Sorensen's profile page

"The depth of empathy in these poems is breathtaking." - Brenda Schmidt, co-author of Siteseeing