Governor General’s Literary Award finalist and bestselling author Steven Heighton’s considerable dramatic lyric powers reach a new sophistication and intensity in his astonishing collection Patient Frame. From the court of Medici to the My Lai massacre; from love for a daughter and mother, through nightmare and displacement, to moments of painful acceptance; from erotic passion to situations of deep moral failure, these poems are part of an ongoing search, a scanning of our human horizons for moments of lasting value. Heighton’s work has long shown a resolve to achieve some viable rapprochement between the mind’s cold structures and the earthbound drives of the body.

Dynamic, vigorous, tender poems as engaged with the moment as they are with traditions of East and West. Patient Frame brings together more of Heighton’s vital translations of poets as diverse as Jorge Luis Borges and Horace.