Kirjahaku

Oneiric, fabulist, hilarious, surreal. No single term seems to sufficiently contain Mikko Harvey’s delightful, cheeky, absurdist, inimitable debut poetry collection.A bomb and a raindrop make small talk as they fall through the air; a visit to the phlebotomist evolves into a nightmarish party; a boy notices himself turning into a piano key. Reading Unstable Neighbourhood Rabbit is like spending the day at a strange amusement park. At first the rides appear familiar—then you realize they possess the power to not only thrill and terrify, but destabilize your very notion of amusement. These poems veer sharply away from what’s normally expected of poetry, instead bringing readers to that darkened, awkward, interior space where we are free to be most ourselves.

The new collection from RBC/PEN Canada New Voices Award winner Mikko Harvey. Mikko Harvey’s new collection invites readers into a world that is and is not the world we know. In poems at once surreal, satiric, and tender, we encounter a cast of surprising non-human characters — the bear who sells herbal remedies, the politically influential lizard, the mean butterfly — yet at the core of this book is Harvey’s impulse to confront the challenges of human intimacy. Let the World Have You is a vibrant report on the ways in which we are delightfully, awkwardly, heartbreakingly entangled: with each other, with the environment we inhabit, and with the psychological environments that inhabit us.