Hump

2010 John Hirsch Award for most Promising Manitoba Writer

Winner 2011 Aqua Books Lansdowne Poetry Prize

Finalist 2011 ReLit Award

Hump is a mash-up of pregnancy-and-mothering poems and urban/nature/love poems that functions as an anti-sentiment manifesto from Winnipeg writer Ariel Gordon. Month by month, stanza by stanza, Gordon attempts to adequately represent the wonder and devilment of being-with-child. Hump is a love poem written simultaneously to a father and child, to a lover and the glimmer in his eye, and to a city that is gritty, faded, but still greener-than-most.

Praise for Hump

Gordon channels Adrienne Rich’s dichotomy of love and frustration.—Winnipeg Free Press

Ariel Gordon’s writing allows the reader access to the essence of a place and time. Her command of language brings an importance to moments both fateful and seemingly insignificant. Her work displays a surprising combination of ease and conviction, of playfulness tempered with insight, and evokes a vivid sense of the word in its studied context, the image in its rightful place.—Jury for Hirsh Award

Ariel Gordon is superbly, supremely, a poet of the body. She finds words for the physicality of the forest, of the garden, of pregnancy. Hump speaks the erotics of being alive and being in love with being alive.—Robert Kroetsch

The focus of Hump is the rich experience of motherhood and marriage on the one hand, and of city life in the integrated context of the natural world, which is everywhere engaging, fierce, beautiful, and unstoppable. This is capable, exuberant writing, at once passionate and meticulous. Hump is a worthy first book indeed.—Michael Harris, Kenneth Meadwell, and Serge Patrice Thibodeau, jurors for the Aqua Books Lansdowne Prize for Poetry

Brimming with finely crafted poems that thrum with life and love, Hump is indeed a very promising debut.—CV2