Winner of the 2006 A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry and shortlisted for the McAuslan First Book Prize (Quebec Writers' Federation). Shortlisted for the 2007 Pat Lowther Award and the 2007 ReLit Awards.

Poems that reach towards the lost or the might have been.

In her debut collection, Susan Elmslie delves into the life and mental illness of the real person behind Andre Breton's surrealist romance, Nadja, recovering the story of a flesh and blood woman who became a symbol for the unknowability of the feminine and the irrational side of the human psyche. Ultimately, I, Nadja is about many women as Elmslie’s lyrically astute, confident lines move into the daily world of motherhood, adolescent memories and heroines like Marie Curie and George Sand. With her great fury of a voice, Elmslie's poems are forthright and daring, fearlessly rhapsodic, as "they sing/your shape through doorways,… sing/the whole house awake."

Susan Elmslie's first trade collection of poetry, I, Nadja, and Other Poems (Brick, 2006), won the A.M. Klein Poetry Prize and was shortlisted for the McAuslan First Book Prize, the Pat Lowther Award, and a ReLit Award. Her poems have also appeared in several journals and anthologies--including the Best Canadian Poetry in English (2008, 2015)--and were collected in a prize-winning chapbook, When Your Body Takes to Trembling (Cranberry Tree, 1996). She lives in Montreal and teaches English literature and creative writing at Dawson College.

Susan Elmslie's profile page