2022 ReLit Awards Longlist

"Please stay with me, please stay here, please cause poltergeists in my stupid apartment…"

Late in the evening of December 13, 2007, Andrea Actis found her father, Jeff, facedown dead in her East Vancouver apartment. So began her passage through grief, self-reckoning, and graduate school in Providence, Rhode Island, where the poetics she studied (and sometimes repudiated) became integral to her gradual reconstruction of wholeness. An assemblage of "evidence" recovered from emails about paranormal encounters sent and received by Jeff (greyallover@yahoo.com), junk mail from false prophets, an annotated excerpt from Laura (Riding) Jackson's "The Serious Angels: A True Story," and transcripts of Actis' dreams, conversations, and messages to the dead, Grey All Over not only celebrates a rare, close, complicated father-daughter bond, it also boldly expands the empathetic and critical capacities of poetry itself. In pulling us outside the comfort zones of received aesthetics and social norms, Actis asks us to embrace with whole seriousness "the pragmatics of intuition" in all the ways we read, live, and love.

Andrea Actis

grew up in Toronto but for most of her life has lived in Vancouver on the occupied, ancestral territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. She teaches writing and literature at Capilano University and from 2015 to 2017 edited The Capilano Review. Grey All Over is her first book. Her second book, Our Kind of Seriousness, will come out eventually.

Andrea Actis' profile page