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Grace and Poison
The Small Words in My Body and The Disorder of Love in a single volume that includes a new essay from Connelly about her earlier poetry and her travels since those days. Award-winning poet Karen Connelly's work is a travelogue of her journeys through this life. Written while she was a teen, The Small Words in My Body won the Pat Lowther Award for poetry, a precursor to Connelly's 1993 Governor General's Literary Award for Touch the A Thai Journal. The Disorder of Love may be Connelly's most personal work to date.
- GenresPoetry
196 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 2001
15 people want to read
About the author
Karen Connelly
22 books81 followersKaren Connelly was born in Calgary, Alberta, in 1969, to a large working class family. She's the author of eleven best-selling books of nonfiction, fiction, and poetry. She has read from her work and lectured in Canada, Europe, Asia, and Australia. She has won the Pat Lowther Award for her poetry, the Governor General’s Award for her non-fiction, and Britain’s Orange Broadband Prize for New Fiction for her first novel The Lizard Cage. Karen has served on the board member of PEN Canada and has been active in the Free Burma movement. A proficient to fluent speaker of several languages, she divides her time between her home in rural Greece and her home in Toronto, Canada. She is married with a young child.
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October 18, 2025
Grace and Poison is much more than a poetry collection: it is an emotional geography in verse where body, languages, and places intertwine until they become a single voice. The volume brings together two of Connelly’s early books, The Small Words in My Body and The Disorder of Love and frames them with an introductory essay in which she recounts how poetry, language learning, and travel opened the way for her “from Canada to Asia to Greece,” leading to a sense of home within a world of borders and migrations. This trajectory is precisely what makes the book magnetic: Greece is not a mere backdrop, but an embodied memory, a school of desire and belonging.
While reading, I felt every fiber resonate whenever the Mediterranean emerged—its tactile light, salt on the skin, squares where the night expands time, voices that turn into song. Connelly brings to the page the body as a map and language as a harbor, and wherever Greece appears, her voice becomes warmer, more grounded. It is no coincidence: the author lived for years among Greek islands and cities, and in other works she has written about a long Hellenic season that here filters into images, rhythms, and everyday myths.
I especially loved the section drawn from The Disorder of Love, where love is “serious lust and serious love,” but also love for “homelands and elsewheres”: among the figures we encounter is even a Voula dancing rebetiko, and suddenly I found myself in neighborhood tavernas, among damp glasses and wooden floors echoing with footsteps. This is the living, untidy Mediterranean that touches me most deeply: eros as a way of knowing the world, music as a grammar of the body, community as a poetic act.
Connelly writes with a sensual naturalness that needs no embellishment: brief, clear images that open like windows. When she speaks of learning a new language, it feels as if she were describing falling in love with a city: stumbling, repeating, discovering, and then suddenly, the phrase that inhabits you. In the opening essay (worth the book on its own), she explicitly declares these connections—poetry/language/body/land—and the reader recognizes them, because they are already present in the poems like a watermark.
From an editorial point of view, Grace and Poison also works as an entry point into her early poetic work: it gathers the two books into a single volume published by Turnstone Press (2001) and rereads them in the light of Connelly’s travels and maturity. It is a “first act” that shows how early she found her stride: attention to small sensualities, the ability to make intimacy and landscape coexist, an international breath without ever losing the concreteness of detail.
Why, then, did this book strike me so deeply in the Greek passages? Because Connelly does not use Greece as a postcard, but as a lived practice: walking, listening, allowing oneself to be “translated” by places. In those verses I recognized my Greece—not the monument, but the scarred marble table, the shadow of a bougainvillea staining the page, the rebetiko serving as counterpoint to desire. It is there that her poetry becomes most mine: when the sea enters the syntax and language, like an island, receives and changes you.
In conclusion: Grace and Poison is a book to keep close to the body. You read it in a low voice, the way you talk to a friend sitting on a stone wall at sunset. And when Greece arrives—its light, its music, its slow obstinacy—I recognize myself without reservation. It is rare for a “transitional” collection to feel so complete: here, instead, every poem is a threshold. To cross it is like coming home.
While reading, I felt every fiber resonate whenever the Mediterranean emerged—its tactile light, salt on the skin, squares where the night expands time, voices that turn into song. Connelly brings to the page the body as a map and language as a harbor, and wherever Greece appears, her voice becomes warmer, more grounded. It is no coincidence: the author lived for years among Greek islands and cities, and in other works she has written about a long Hellenic season that here filters into images, rhythms, and everyday myths.
I especially loved the section drawn from The Disorder of Love, where love is “serious lust and serious love,” but also love for “homelands and elsewheres”: among the figures we encounter is even a Voula dancing rebetiko, and suddenly I found myself in neighborhood tavernas, among damp glasses and wooden floors echoing with footsteps. This is the living, untidy Mediterranean that touches me most deeply: eros as a way of knowing the world, music as a grammar of the body, community as a poetic act.
Connelly writes with a sensual naturalness that needs no embellishment: brief, clear images that open like windows. When she speaks of learning a new language, it feels as if she were describing falling in love with a city: stumbling, repeating, discovering, and then suddenly, the phrase that inhabits you. In the opening essay (worth the book on its own), she explicitly declares these connections—poetry/language/body/land—and the reader recognizes them, because they are already present in the poems like a watermark.
From an editorial point of view, Grace and Poison also works as an entry point into her early poetic work: it gathers the two books into a single volume published by Turnstone Press (2001) and rereads them in the light of Connelly’s travels and maturity. It is a “first act” that shows how early she found her stride: attention to small sensualities, the ability to make intimacy and landscape coexist, an international breath without ever losing the concreteness of detail.
Why, then, did this book strike me so deeply in the Greek passages? Because Connelly does not use Greece as a postcard, but as a lived practice: walking, listening, allowing oneself to be “translated” by places. In those verses I recognized my Greece—not the monument, but the scarred marble table, the shadow of a bougainvillea staining the page, the rebetiko serving as counterpoint to desire. It is there that her poetry becomes most mine: when the sea enters the syntax and language, like an island, receives and changes you.
In conclusion: Grace and Poison is a book to keep close to the body. You read it in a low voice, the way you talk to a friend sitting on a stone wall at sunset. And when Greece arrives—its light, its music, its slow obstinacy—I recognize myself without reservation. It is rare for a “transitional” collection to feel so complete: here, instead, every poem is a threshold. To cross it is like coming home.
Displaying 1 of 1 review