Wellwater

by Karen Solie

Winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection
Winner of the Governor General's Literary Award for Poetry
An Observer, Telegraph, TLS, Guardian, Scotsman, New Statesman, Financial Times and Irish Times Book of the Year
Shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize
Shortlisted for the PEN Heaney Prize

Wellwater demonstrates a poet writing at the height of her powers. In poems that are supple, philosophical, bracingly honest and ribbed with erudition, Wellwater conducts a self-interrogative conversation with a culture in crisis and a natural world on the brink. Thresholds abound, ‘doors between dimensions’ where past selves or lost loved ones speak to us ‘death is not Saskatchewan’ shrugs one encountered soul, ‘we don’t all know each other in this place’.

Solie excels as a laureate of the transitory, of ‘baffling flats . . . tiny museums of illegalities’, motel rooms exuding a ‘low hum of menace’. Her roving, syntactically elegant poems will often resolve in disarming directness, a precise admission of the emotional stakes. Karen Solie is increasingly recognised as one of the essential voices in world poetry. Wellwater will delight those already in the know, while new readers of her work will be astonished.

'Solie is an essential writer . . . anyone remotely interested in 21st-century literature, or 21st-century life, should read her' – Tristram Fane Saunders, Telegraph

'Powerful, philosophical, intelligent . . . [Solie is] adept at pulling great wisdom from the ordinary' – Griffin Prize judges Anne Carson, Kathleen Jamie and Carl Phillips

'A work of political profundity and linguistic dexterity that constantly surprises.' – Susannah Dickey, PEN Heaney Prize-winning author of ISDAL and Tennis Lessons

'Karen Solie should be read wherever English is spoken' – Michael Hofmann, LRB

'Half-expertise and half-magic . . . Wellwater is a terrifying book – and a masterly one. Solie is as good as poetry gets' – Declan Ryan, Telegraph

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction

100 pages, Kindle Edition

Published April 24, 2025

About the author

Prize-winning and internationally celebrated poet Karen Solie grew up on her family's farm in rural Saskatchewan. She was educated at the University of Lethbridge and the University of Victoria. She has taught English at the University of Victoria and poetry at the Banff Centre for the Arts Writing Studio. Solie has also served as writer-in-residence at universities and arts centres across the country, including the University of Alberta and the University of New Brunswick. Karen Solie is one of Canada's leading contemporary lyric poets.

Reviews

[Jillian B · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a fellow transplant from the Canadian Prairies to Toronto, I connected deeply with these poems. This collection contains beautiful poetry about nature, poems with a stirring environmental message, and poetry about the realities of day-to-day life in Toronto (like the experience of being told to smile by a stranger and sworn at when you ignore him). Reading these made me feel more deeply connected to the province I hail from as well as the wonderful, imperfect city I now call home.

[Clover · Rating 3 out of 5]

3/5
Beautiful, modern, and full of anxiety, stress, fear, and grief over the changing world.

Out of the 42 poems, I only liked 18 of them. I found myself questioning some of them after I finished, I just couldn't get what I had just read. Many I found ended too short, even ones I liked, as if they never got finished.

Here are the ones I enjoyed:
The Trees in Riverside Park
"The trees are grand hotels closed for the season.
But below ground, social life is taking place."
8 That Which Was Learned in Youth Is Always Most Familiar
A beautiful poem about a child's wisdom

Red Spring
A poem about crops, chemicals, and outcomes. Akin to Percy Schmeiser v. Monsanto.
"{. . .} the earliest stage at which herbicides

may be applied — Luxxur™ for problematic grass weeds —
as white-railed fawns sleep inside wild chokecherry"

Autumn Day
Stark realities of trying to buy a home.

Toronto the Good
Returning to a place you used to live and seeing how unlivable it is now.

On Faith
"There was no reason
not to believe
the overgrown wells
in abandoned yards

still held water
that, like all things forgotten,
was ruined and dangerous."

Parables of the Rat
"And maybe a soul is a satellite,
a small idea orbiting a larger one, a device
to translate a signal
and send it back.

The rat is still a rat.
There is no getting around what we are."

Next Life
"[. . .]the spirit of her belongings, any remnants of utility and charm,

had chosen to accompany her into the next life. The world
used her right up, along with the little she'd been given.
But everything she'd been given she found a use for."

The Snowplow
"[. . .] The plow is a child of the north,
like Romanticism. And what a dad-rock moment

here on the sidewalk, watching the blade
at it's superb angle push everything before it"

The Grasslands
All that is Canada's grasslands; the good and bad; past and present. All of it: beautiful.
"until settlement — as settlement does,
without consultation, in violence and paperwork —
by the Dominion Lands Act of 1872"

Antelope
I don't even know, but the imagery was great.

Smoke
About the wildfires.
"though what arises is not clarity
but a set of new misgivings. Is this how the world will be
and not just how it is?"

Berkeley Hills, 2022
The personification of laurels was wonderful.
"Like girls do, the laurels grow
from the soil of a deep reserve."

Anne Dufourmantelle
" [. . .] names
are the nearest we can get
to truth."

The Barrens
I don't even know, it was just cute and I liked imagining the rabbits losing their keys in alleyways.

Prime Location
"it inhales the amnesia
of spores, light filters through
its soaped windows like light
through the soaped windows

of all the deconsecrated churches
awaiting resurrection as condos"

Orion
"Smoking in the yard two weeks before Christmas
out of the wind, under Orion,
inhaling anger, exhaling sorrow,
which is how anger metabolizes,
the end product always a sorrow
of remorse or failure. I would give this anger
to Orion, whom I've only recently learned to identify"

[Meghan Molnar · Rating 5 out of 5]

a deep love for these poems which have allotted me so much insight and grace both about how to write poems and how to live

[Tina · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was looking for a new poetry book to read and after learning that this author grew up in Saskatchewan I knew I wanted to read this book! I loved Wellwater by Karen Solie! These poems contain great action and I loved the mentions of Canada. My fave poems are That Which Was Learned in Youth Is Always Most Familiar and Toronto the Good. I also loved this line in Flashlight: “for Pete’s sake, death is not Saskatchewan”. I’d love to read this author’s backlist now too!

Thank you to FSG Books via NetGalley for my ARC!

[Dr. Devine · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful collection. Witty and thoughtful observations on all sorts of topics ranging from introspection to Airbnb's.

Really loved "Grasslands" but the whole collection is outstanding. Canadian poetry rarely misses.

[W.S. Luk · Rating 4 out of 5]

"...it's beautiful, when sleeping populations open their eyes/and nitrogen is fixed inside the earth."

Woven around competing perspectives on land, home, and property, WELLWATER's free-verse explorations of environmental themes both beautiful and disquieting remind me at turns of John Kinsella's poems. Solie's style of verse, meditative and loosely structured, means that the poems sometimes blurred into each other when I read them, though a few stood out for their particular beauty: I loved the epiphanic conclusion of "That which was learned in youth...", the economical storytelling of "Smoke" (this may have been what prompted the comparison to Kinsella, whose "Bushfire Approaching" also responds to a wildfire), and the direct but effective satire of "Prime Location".

[Kym · Rating 5 out of 5]

I hadn’t yet been introduced to the work of Canadian poet Karen Solie, so I was especially pleased to receive an advance copy of Wellwater, Solie’s newest poetry collection, due to be published in the US in early May 2026.

Karen Solie writes powerful, lyrical poems about environmental, cultural, and economic issues and how they influence . . . where we live, how we live. Not to be read quickly, her collection is meaty and requires a level of immersion and attention for full impact. I was especially taken with The Grasslands. In fact, I will look forward to purchasing my own copy of this collection when it comes out in May just to have that particular poem in my personal library.

Thank you to Farrar, Strauss and Giraux and to NetGalley for providing an advance copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. The collection will be published May 5, 2026.

4.5 stars, rounded to 5

[Rhea Tregebov · Rating 5 out of 5]

An exceptional book by a highly talented writer. I've long admired Solie, but I think this is her best book yet. "That Which Was Learned in Youth is Almost Most Familiar" is a favourite; utterly charming and also profound. What a lovely read.

[Fátima Chib · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thank you so much to Netgalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux fro sending me this book!
The poems in this collection are so clever, written in such a brilliant way that takes your breath away at the same time as hitting deeply into your core and soul, such a magnificent expirience!

[Emma Reilly · Rating 5 out of 5]

truly cannot believe this is my advisor. she is a genius

[Cooch · Rating 5 out of 5]

Four and a half stars

For me, this collection started slowly and got better and better. I feel it will improve too on further reading.