Passengers

Passengers

Written by: Crummey, Michael

The sixth and, on the surface, most innovative poetry collection from Scotiabank Giller Prize finalist Michael Crummey.

Eclectic, unpredictable, and strange, Passengers follows Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer on an imagined circumnavigation of Newfoundland; traces the island escapades of Lucifer from the time of his arrival as a stowaway in the Middle Ages; and wanders the pre-pandemic cities of Europe, touching down in Stockholm’s ABBA museum, the Belfast Public Library, Austria’s plague cemeteries, and the Czech Republic’s Punkva Caves.

Widely considered “one of Canada's finest writers” (Globe and Mail), Crummey is noted for the immediacy and emotional impact of his poetry and fiction and for his ability to raise the vernacular to planes of “exquisite beauty.”

Part travelogue, part archeological dig, Passengers is an eccentric guide to the wild geography, folklore, and misbegotten history of the human heart.

The sixth and, on the surface, most innovative poetry collection from Scotiabank Giller Prize finalist Michael Crummey.

Eclectic, unpredictable, and strange, Passengers follows Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer on an imagined circumnavigation of Newfoundland; traces the island escapades of Lucifer from the time of his arrival as a stowaway in the Middle Ages; and wanders the pre-pandemic cities of Europe, touching down in Stockholm’s ABBA museum, the Belfast Public Library, Austria’s plague cemeteries, and the Czech Republic’s Punkva Caves.

Widely considered “one of Canada's finest writers” (Globe and Mail), Crummey is noted for the immediacy and emotional impact of his poetry and fiction and for his ability to raise the vernacular to planes of “exquisite beauty.”

Part travelogue, part archeological dig, Passengers is an eccentric guide to the wild geography, folklore, and misbegotten history of the human heart.

Published By House of Anansi Press Inc — Aug 2, 2022
Specifications 128 pages | 6 in x 8 in
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Excerpt
Written By

MICHAEL CRUMMEY is the author of twelve books of poetry and fiction. He was the inaugural winner of the $50,000 Writers’ Trust Fellowship in recognition of “exceptional creative ability and outstanding promise” in his work to date. His most recent novel, The Innocents, won the Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award and was a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Governor General’s Literary Award, and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. Little Dogs: New and Selected Poems appeared in 2017. He lives in St. John’s, where he is starting to feel his age.

Written By

MICHAEL CRUMMEY is the author of twelve books of poetry and fiction. He was the inaugural winner of the $50,000 Writers’ Trust Fellowship in recognition of “exceptional creative ability and outstanding promise” in his work to date. His most recent novel, The Innocents, won the Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award and was a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Governor General’s Literary Award, and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. Little Dogs: New and Selected Poems appeared in 2017. He lives in St. John’s, where he is starting to feel his age.

Short-listed, E.J. Pratt Family Poetry Award, 2023

A native of Newfoundland, Crummey puts travel and alienation at the center of his sixth book, summoning personae from the Devil to the Nobel laureate Tomas Tranströmer (the passengers of the title, perhaps) to evoke an outsider’s perspective.

” —New York Times

In the impressive number of unusual but apt similes and metaphors ... Crummey strikes a compelling balance in tone, writing with both affection and a note of wearied cynicism about the world around him.

” —Quill & Quire