Karen Solie’s most recent collection won a Governor-General’s Literary Award and the T.S. Eliot Prize.Adrian Pope/Supplied
Karen Solie has no problem with being considered a Prairie poet.
Born in Moose Jaw, Sask., where she grew up on her family’s farm, Solie has had what she describes as a “fairly peripatetic” life. But no matter how far afield she strays, her poetic imagination continues to return to the place where she grew up.
“There’s nothing like being somewhere else to put in relief previous experiences of place,” she says on the phone from her current base in Toronto. “When I’m writing about a particular place, it’s often because I’m not there.”
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Her most recent collection Wellwater, winner of a 2025 Governor-General’s Literary Award and the T.S. Eliot Prize, is influenced by that distance, in both geography and time.
One poem from the collection, titled Holiday at the Wave Pool, paints a highly specific portrait of a place outside Canada’s assumed cultural centre of gravity, Toronto. In it, Solie describes a childhood trip to the West Edmonton Mall with its “ice-free corporate boulevards” and stereos that pump out “serviceable pop.”
“I feel like in some respects, in Canada, having one’s work represent a region is somehow bad,” Solie says. “I’ve never believed that.”
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The international T.S. Eliot award comes at an auspicious time, given Canada’s riven relationship with its southern neighbour and a renewed push to flex our nationalist muscles on the world stage.
“It’s always good when some Canadian artist has some success internationally,” Solie says. “It’s good for the culture. It’s good for attention to the arts, not only internationally, but to perhaps remind organizations and government funding bodies that Canadian culture is an export.”
In Canada, over the course of six published books, Solie has established herself as one of the most important and lauded poets of her generation. Her 2009 collection Pigeon won the Pat Lowther Award, the Trillium Book Award for Poetry and the Griffin Poetry Prize. In 2015, she was the recipient of the Latner Griffin Writers’ Trust Poetry Prize for a poet in mid-career.
Her language is accessible and grounded in the physical world, but it is also highly attuned to musicality, rhythm and euphony. Though certain subjects – the environment, the climate crisis, the overlap between the natural and the built worlds – keep cropping up, her curiosity is wide-ranging. It often takes time for her to consider a project a cohesive collection.
“It’s quite far along in the process before I start thinking of the thing as a book,” Solie says. “It’s just about writing the poems as they happen for me. I don’t often have any kind of plan.”
She counsels her students not to think in terms of theme when putting together a group of poems, since that could result in simply ticking off boxes related to style or subject. At the same time, she acknowledges that a kind of through-line will crop up in a poet’s work organically.
“I feel like there’s going to be one whether we want one or not,” she says. “These things come out of our minds at a certain period of time in a certain set of circumstances.”
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The organic nature of thematic development seems to be an extension of Solie’s poetic practice, which doesn’t differentiate between writing from the heart and writing from the head. When it comes to intuition and technique, “you can’t prise them apart,” she says. “The more you start thinking about things like syntax and rhythm and what a metaphor is doing conceptually, the more intuitive you can be.”
For Solie, the greatest amount of heavy lifting occurs in the process of refining those intuitive impulses into poetic lines. “I do my best work in revision,” she says. “For me, that’s where writing really happens. My first thoughts are not my best thoughts.”
In Wellwater, some of the poems evolved from her thoughts and feelings on issues such as climate change and Toronto’s housing affordability crisis. Solie says that each individual poet must decide how explicitly they wish to engage with social or political material, but the power of verse to clarify and cut through the noise of our distracted age is part of why it is still sought out in times of crisis.
“I really do think that we have to feel like human beings with spirits in order to be able to do anything,” she says. “That is the primary goal and function and role of art.”