Sue Goyette

Sue Goyette has published a novel and ten books of poems, including The Brief Reincarnation of a Girl, Penelope, Monoculture and Ocean (for which she was awarded the 2015 Lieutenant Governor of Nova Scotia Masterworks Arts Award). Her work has been translated into French, Spanish and German and has been featured in films, subways, buses, spraypainted on a sidewalk and tattooed. She has won several national awards including the Pat Lowther Award, the Bliss Carman Award, and the CBC Literary Prize for Poetry. She lives in Halifax (K’jipuktuk) where she teaches creative writing at Dalhousie University.



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The Brief Reincarnation of a Girl
Sue Goyette

2015 / Poetry / $19.95
9781554471461 / Trade paper / 64 pp


In 2006, a four-year-old Massachusetts girl died from prolonged exposure to a cocktail of drugs that a psychiatrist had prescribed to treat ADHD and bipolar disorder; her parents were convicted of her murder. In The Brief Reincarnation of a Girl, Sue Goyette strives to confront the senselessness of this story, answering logic’s failure to encompass the complexity of mental illness, poverty and child neglect (or that of our torn and tangled social ‘safety net’) with a mythopoetic, sideways use of image and language. Avoiding easy indignation, Goyette portrays the court proceedings’ usual suspects in unusual ways (the judge, the jury, the lawyers, the witnesses and the girl’s troubled parents), evokes the ghost of the girl, personifies poverty as a belligerent bully and offers an unexpected emblem of love and hope in a bear. Like the utterances of a Shakespearean fool, Goyette’s quirky, often counter-logical poems offer a more potent vision of reality than any documentary account, her eulogy for a girl society let down renewing the prospect for empathy and change.

Winner of the 2016 ReLit Poetry Award and Winner of the 2016 J.M. Abraham Poetry Prize.



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Other Books by this Author

Future Howl
Sue Goyette

2025 / Canadian Poetry / $24.95 CAN
9781554472796 / Trade paper / 128 pp
Monoculture
Sue Goyette

2022 / Canadian Poetry / $24.95 CAN
9781554472376 / Trade paper / 176 pp
Solstice 2020: An Archive
Sue Goyette

2021 / Canadian Poetry / $18.95 CAN
9781554472246 / Trade paper / 48 pp
Anthesis: A Memoir
Sue Goyette

2020 / Poetry / $19.95 CAN
9781554472109 / Trade paper / 80 pp
Penelope
Sue Goyette

2017 / Canadian Poetry / $19.95 CAN
9781554471744 / Trade paper / 96 pp
Ocean
Sue Goyette

2013 / Poetry / $19.95 CAN
9781554471225 / Trade paper / 80 pp

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