Winner of the 2011 Concordia University First Book Prize, Quebec Writers' Federation Literary Awards

Poems exploring the idea of home and the difficulties of a deeply ambiguous relationship to that word.

At once wise and achingly at a loss, Ann Scowcroft's The Truth of Houses is an elegant debut collection. While very intimate -- even startlingly intimate at times -- the voices of these poems are constantly taking a step backward, wrestling for a measure of distance and perspective. Reading them, we eavesdrop on the uncovering of a personal vernacular that might allow the present to be better lived; we have the sense of overhearing a particular yet eerily familiar inner struggle -- a struggle for insight, for an equanimity with which both narrator and fortunate reader might re-enter life anew.

Ann Scowcroft has been a professional writer and editor for many years, and was an academic for a few. She has a PhD in Applied Linguistics and presently works in the field of humanitarian assistance. Quebec is home base. The Truth of Houses is her first book.

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