Natalie Rice
Natalie Rice is the author of the poetry collection Scorch (2023) and the chapbook 26 Visions of Light (2020), both published by Gaspereau Press. Her second collection will be published by Gaspereau in 2025. Her poems have appeared in journals such as Terrain.org, Event Magazine, The Dalhousie Review, The Malahat Review and Contemporary Verse 2, and are forthcoming in Prairie Fire, Crannóg, Grain and Queen’s Quarterly. She holds an MFA from the University of British Columbia and lives on the south shore of Nova Scotia. Follow her on Instagram or contact her here.
*
Scorch
Gaspereau Press, 2023
buy now→
In Scorch, Natalie Rice situates our sense of individual disconnection and grief within a larger ecology of loss, where nature is an active force and change is a continuous, complex cycle encompassing both the wildfire and whatever beauty may still rise out of the scorched ground. Grappling with connection and disconnection, plenitude and emptiness, Rice’s poems “lean/into what cannot be explained,” listening for the music, voicing the contradictions—“how the unsayable/hung like a red berry in the back/of my throat.”— from the publisher
Lyrically taut.— Rob McLennan
[Poems of] beauty and destruction.—Emily Cann
Poems tethered to an aftermath of collapse.—Jami Macarty