Paper Boat: New and Selected Poems, 1961–2023

This expansive and admirable collection from Atwood (after Dearly) captures the prolific Canadian novelist, essayist, and poet’s brightest poems. Fans of Atwood can witness the evolution of her poetic mind, teasing out themes of fantasy, nature, and the female experience that she has explored throughout her career. “Sons branch out, but/ one woman leads to another,” she writes. Atwood is a master of setting an eerie stage quickly, as she does in “This is a Photograph of Me” from 1966, which describes a picture from the perspective of the drowned: “I am in the lake in the centre/ of the picture, just under the surface.” Elsewhere, the head of a hen that has just been cut from its body watches itself, “a single/ flopping breast,/ muttering about life/ in its thickening red voice.” She writes from a wide array of perspectives: Canadian settler and writer Susanna Moodie, goddesses, a tin woodwoman, Ava Gardner reincarnated as a magnolia, and animals. Atwood’s recent poems are confident and often funny. In “Thirty,” the octogenarian asks, “Do you ever reach a point at which/ you don’t find the children hilarious?/ By children, I mean–you understand—/ anyone younger than you.” Atwood proves yet again that she’s still at the top of her game. (Oct.)