The celebrated poet hailed by Ursula K. Le Guin as a "storyteller, truth-teller, and visionary" gives us a mesmerizing new collection of poems that are funny, wise, moving, and surprising.

How many gods can dance on the head of Lorna Crozier's pen?

The poet Lorna Crozier has always been brilliant at fusing the ordinary with the other-worldly in strange and surprising ways. Now the Governor General's Literary Award-winning author of Inventing the Hawk returns with God of Shadows, a wryly wise book that offers a polytheistic gallery of the gods we never knew existed and didn't know we needed. To read these poems is to be ready to offer your own prayers to the god of shadows, the god of quirks, and the god of vacant houses. Sing new votive hymns to the gods of horses, birds, cats, rats, and insects. And give thanks at the altars of the gods of doubt, guilt, and forgetting. What life-affirming questions have these deities come to ask? Perhaps it is simply this: How can poems be at once so profound, original and lively, and also so much fun? RAYMOND SOUSTER AWARD LONGLIST

CITY OF VICTORIA BUTLER BOOK PRIZE FINALIST

“God of Shadows is sure to please the god of books.” —Winnipeg Free Press

“Lorna Crozier provides us with an extraordinary, spirit-saturated world in this book. It’s all worked out within a teasing intimacy with things that is full of sly praising. Cats, balconies, things without merit, the state of astonishment—she knows them and they look back at her. She grasps their beauty, fidelity, and genius. There is such fun here, such compassion and sorrow. How much we owe to Crozier’s wit and probing gaze.” —Tim Lilburn

“All good poets notice things. But Crozier cares—she cares personally—about what she notices; and her special gift is her sense for the caring that arises in other things. Recklessly exuberant, acute and pensive by turns, these new poems exhibit Crozier’s signature interest in the world’s odd-angled and gawky glory. How it shines in the cloudless, wide gaze of her heart.” —Jan Zwicky