First Woman

Award-winning Canadian writer Patricia Keeney’s latest collection of poetry, First Woman, continues her personal journeys inward and across the world. Lyric and political, emotionally raw and deeply human, the volume ranges from sexual love to family, from writing to confrontations with power and profound meditations on life and culture. Her ninth collection since her debut in 1988 with Swimming Alone, these new poems—as the Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko has written of her—are filled with “the fiery mystery of inspiration—a mystery ‘that burns long after one closes the book.”

First Woman is both personal and political. It takes personal journeys inward and across the world. It both thinks and feels, striking a broadly humanist note in a literary world of theory, a technological world of quick fixes and a political world lacking vision. First Woman, also includes some of her most popular poems from earlier volumes making it an important place to either begin one’s own love affair with this unique and admired poet or to continue it. In either case, the contact will be filled with insight, intelligence and love.