Re-Origin of Species

Winner of RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers Winner of CBC Poetry Prize Shortlisted for the 2020 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award Longlisted for the 2020 Pat Lowther Memorial Award

From hybrid bodies to shifting landscapes, Re-Origin of Species blurs the lines of the real. These poems journey through illness and altered states to position disability and madness as evolutionary traits; skilled adaptations aligned with ecological change.

A lyric contemplation of our relationship to the environment, this book looks at the interdependence of species. Weaving personal narratives with a study of the insect kingdom, it draws parallels between human illness, climate change, and the state of peril in the natural world.

Praise for Re-Origin of Species:

In this debut collection of startling beauty, Alessandra Naccarato weaves together the mythological and mundane, the ephemeral and the eternal, into a luminous tapestry of lyric and narrative. Naccarato’s shimmering threads illuminate the connections that bind together every living thing on every level of being-from the interpersonal, to the political, to the spiritual. This is exquisite, playful, intentional poetry-and it just might be medicine for us all. -Kai Cheng Thom, author of I HOPE WE CHOOSE LOVE: A Trans Girl’s Notes From the End of the World

What a hive of a book-these poems are so urgent, gorgeous, and necessary. Re-Origin of Species is a siren’s call and warning siren all at once. -Leah Horlick, author of For Your Own Good

Ranging from the sting of personal loss to navigating landscapes full of promise, Naccarato?s poetry interrogates the place where the personal meets the wild. -2015 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award Jury