was born in Toronto in 1958. In 1996, her first novel Fugitive Pieces established her as one of Canada’s most lauded authors. Winner of the Guardian Fiction Award, “ Fugitive Pieces has qualities one associates with poetry: intensity, precision, and a celebration of moments of vision.” Not straying from the truth, Michaels has published two collections of poetry: The Weight of Oranges (the Commonwealth Prize for the Americas, 1986) and Miner's Pond (Canadian Authors Award, 1991). Her third collection, Skin Divers, will be published later this year. “The present, like a landscape, is only a small part of a mysterious narrative.” Anne Michaels lives in Toronto.
Fugitive Pieces (part)
The shadow past is shaped by everything that never happened. Invisible, it melts the present like rain through karst. A biography of longing. It steers us like magnetism, a spirit torque. This is how one becomes undone by smell, a word, a place, the photo of a mountain of shoes. By love that closes its mouth before calling a name.
I did not witness the most important events of my life. My deepest story must be told by a blind man, a prisoner of sound. From behind a wall, from underground. From the corner of a small house on a small island that juts like a bone from the skin of sea.
The shadow past is shaped by everything that never happened. Invisible, it melts the present like rain through karst. A biography of longing. It steers us like magnetism, a spirit torque. This is how one becomes undone by smell, a word, a place, the photo of a mountain of shoes. By love that closes its mouth before calling a name.
I did not witness the most important events of my life. My deepest story must be told by a blind man, a prisoner of sound. From behind a wall, from underground. From the corner of a small house on a small island that juts like a bone from the skin of sea.