Hard Feelings holds the instant up, halts it mid-air, exposes an astounding world: fake cicada cries blare from loudspeakers; a rack of meat hangs from a bicycle basket; Nixon sidles off with the cake; diving horses of Atlantic City plunge. The neon rope of loneliness tightens. Like holding a glass up to the light to find it muddy with marks, Hard Feelings reveals, as Francine Prose writes, “little climaxes of disquiet.” Here, our strange, genuine and unexpected human impulses are revealed. These poems offer a hopefulness and a gratitude for our ordinary, everyday lives.

Sheryda Warrener is the author of the poetry collections Hard Feelings (Snare, 2010) and Floating is Everything (Nightwood, 2015). Her work can be found in Event, The Fiddlehead, Grain, Hazlitt, and The Believer, among other literary journals. She is a recipient of The Puritan’s Thomas Morton Memorial Prize for poetry, and recent poems have been selected for Best Canadian Poetry, The Next Wave: An Anthology of 21st Century Canadian Poetry, and the 2020 CBC Poetry Prize longlist. Sheryda lives in Vancouver BC with her son and partner, and teaches poetry and interdisciplinary forms in the School of Creative Writing at UBC.

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“What makes these poems, these little narratives, these anti-stories, is their stagger, their stammer and just how damned tight they are, even in their perceived looseness.”—rob mclennan

rob mclennan

“Warrener combines crisp description with lyrical tone.”—Montreal Review of Books

Montreal Review of Books