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ISBN 0-9733952-6-5
978-0-9733952-6-6
5.5 x 8.5, 84 Pages
Trade paperback
$18 CDN

Natural Disasters is the first poetry collection from Andrea MacPherson. It explores memory and history, asking if it is possible to inherit the past and the generational complexities that come along with it. Stories of lost sisters and marriages based on card games combine with the immediate and personal responses to wild fires and collapsed schoolhouses.

The collection is also concerned with place, from the dry land of the interior of British Columbia to the rugged beauty of the west coast shoreline. These settings affect not only language and mood, but tangible links to the past, the “dusky valleys” and “planks stained with fish blood”. Here, the tragic mingles with the everyday, allowing shadowy figures and hazy memory to once again become real.

George McWhirter, Vancouver’s Poet Laureate, says of the collection: This book captures the core of Andrea MacPherson’s Scots-Irish-Canadian heritage, where even spite is a delight and dread, delight and devotion all feed on the lush BC criss-cross of cedar cloak on tartan and saffron lines.

Stephanie Bolster, Governor General award winning poet, says: MacPherson knows where desire and grief, inextricably bound, lodge in the body and she knows that language can awaken memory to make ‘wings beat against the chest’. In Natural Disasters, the chest is pulled open to show the wings inside.

Andrea MacPherson currently acts as Reviews Editor for Event Magazine and teaches Creative Writing and English with University College of the Fraser Valley and Douglas College. Her debut novel When She Was Electric was listed No. 6 on CBC Canada Reads: People’s Choice. Her second novel, Beyond the Blue (Random House), was released in January of 2007. Andrea resides in Cloverdale, British Columbia.