Shortlisted for the 2009 Lampman-Scott Award (for the best book of poetry in the National Capital Region)

Brenda Leifso’s first volume of poetry is a stunning debut: haunting, disturbing but resolutely beautiful. With an unflinching eye, Leifso explores the uncertainty of memory, the legacy of place, the powerful dynamics of sexuality and secrecy, and the violence inherent in family relations. Her central section, “The Theban Women,” is a multi-voiced re-imagining of Euripides’s The Bacchae; this drama in verse gives voice to women long silent, and together with Leifso’s more personal poems, it forms a book of exceptional power from a poet whose voice is as honest as it is beautiful.

Wild Madder is Brenda Leifso's third book of poetry, following Barren the Fury (Pedlar Press, 2015) and Daughters of Men (Brick Books, 2008), which was shortlisted for an Ottawa Book Award. Her poetry has been published in journals and anthologies across Canada, has won the Banff Centre Bliss Carman Poetry Award, and has been short- and long-listed for the CBC Literary prize. She is a freelance editor and occasional academic instructor, and also runs her own yoga business. She lives, gratefully, near the shores of Lake Ontario in Kingston, Ontario.

Brenda Leifso's profile page