Books
Stedfast (2023)
Goose Lane Editions - icehouse poetry
Breaking open John Keats’s “Last Sonnet,” Ali Blythe writes marginality into the canon, at once claiming, reviving, and un-fixing the Romantic vision.
Taking place over one night, the poet in bed next to a sleeping lover, Blythe’s revelatory poems struggle with questions of illusion and reality, immersion and escapism, that which endures and that which is transient.
"A carefully tended celebration of queer love and of hope...every single word in this slight volume is heavy with love for its subject, for language, and for poetry itself."
— Victoria Book Prize Jury
Hymnswitch (2019)
Goose Lane Editions - icehouse poetry
In Hymnswitch, Blythe takes up the themes of identity and the body once again, this time casting an eye backwards and forwards, visiting places of recovery and wrestling with the transition into one's own skin. Readers will find themselves holding their breath at the risk and beauty and difficulty of the balance Blythe strikes in the midst of ineffable complexity.
"With incredible economy of language and dialectical drama at the levels of sentence and caesura, Blythe delivers taut yet expansive hymns from 'the golden-throated era / of the hormone'"
— Quill & Quire starred review
"an important contribution to the field of trans poetics"
— Canadian Literature
Twoism (2015)
Goose Lane Editions - icehouse poetry
Part roving eye, part devotion, you wander hotel corridors, entering rooms not quite yours, trying on clothes, blankets, skins. Arguing with the body's limits and its trickery, you are always in disguise. Sometimes you're Leda; sometimes the swan. The rooms are haunted with gendered injuries of the past... but messengers arrive to guide you.
"perhaps incurring the most dog-eared pages ever"
— The Puritan
"Blythe illuminates a world both ruined and beautiful"
— Jury Citation, Writers Trust of Canada
