Helen Humphreys

A lonely boy in a prairie town befriends a tramp in 1947 and then witnesses a shocking murder. Based on a true story. Canwood, Saskatchewan, 1947. Leonard Flint, a lonely boy in a small farming town befriends the local tramp, a man known as Rabbit Foot Bill. Bill doesn't talk much, but he allows Leonard to accompany him as he sets rabbit snares and to visit his small, secluded dwelling. Being with Bill is everything to young Leonard-an escape from...

In her third book of poetry The Perils of Geography, Helen Humphreys charts a world that opens under the prodding and promise of language. With the wit and eye for evocative detail which gained readers for both Gods and Other Mortals and Nuns Looking Anxious, Listening to Radios, Humphreys probes the immediacy of now, the intensity of this, the residue of then. Don't be deceived by the spare appearance; her poems are resonant and full, "all angles...

World War II. Downed during his first mission, James Hunter is taken captive as a German POW. To bide his time, he studies a nest of redstarts at the edge of camp. Some prisoners plot escape; some are shot. And then, one day, James is called to the Kommandant's office. Meanwhile, back home, James's new wife, Rose, is on her own, free in a way she has never known. Then, James's sister, Enid, loses everything during the Blitz and must seek shelter with...

Award-winning poet and novelist Helen Humphreys returns to her series of nature meditations in this gorgeously written and illustrated book that takes a deep look at the forgotten world of herbariums and the people who amassed collections of plant specimens in the 19th and 20th centuries. From Emily Dickinson's and Henry David Thoreau's collections, to the amateur naturalists, whose names are forgotten, but whose collections still grace our world,...

Physical and fiercely lyric, Helen Humphreys' Anthem is a litany of want. A song of poverty and of desire, of the reach forward and the relentless backward glance. With stark images and subtle, tensile strength, her poems touch that rare interval between presence and absence, echo and answer, between wall and window and sky -- that gap in which we live, the space words make.

Composed in small scenes, “Followed by the Lark” is a novel of meditations-on loss, on change, on the danger and healing that come from communion with the natural world. Henry David Thoreau's connection to nature was tied to his feelings of grief: before he was twenty-seven years old and went to live at Walden Pond, two of those closest to him had died-his older brother, John, and his friend Charles Wheeler. Nature provided solace for these losses,...

"Every evening, Alice and five other people gather at the forest's edge, trying to call their dogs back from the feral pack they've joined. Alice's boyfriend had abandoned her dog there, in an act of anger and desperation. Most of the rest have similar tales of jealousy or vengeance enacted upon them through their dogs: Jamie is rebelling against his stepfather; Lily, who has suffered brain damage, is considered irresponsible." "Becoming more deeply...