From internationally celebrated writer and visual artist Shani Mootoo comes Cane | Fire, an immersive and vivid collection that marks a long-awaited return to poetry.

Throughout this evocative, sensual collection, akin to a poetic memoir, past and present are in conversation with each other as the narrator moves from Ireland to San Fernando, and finally to Canada. The reinterpretations and translation of this journey and its associated family history give meaning to the present. Through these deeply personal poems, and Mootoo's own artwork, we begin to understand how a life can not only be shaped, but even reimagined.

SHANI MOOTOO was born in Ireland and raised in Trinidad. Her poetry books include Oh Witness Dey!, Cane | Fire, and The Predicament of Or. She is the author of several novels, including Cereus Blooms at Night, now a Penguin Modern Classic and a Vintage Classics book, and Polar Vortex, both shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. Mootoo's novels have been long and shortlisted for the Booker Prize, the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and the Dublin Literary Award, among others. Her prose and poetry have been widely anthologized, , including in Trinidad Noir, Trinidad Noir: The Classics, and The Haunted Tropics, and her poetry has appeared in Wasafiri, Poetry Magazine, Audemas, and Room Magazine, among other magazines and journals. She has been awarded the Doctor of Letters honoris causa degree from Western University and is a recipient of Lambda Literary's James Duggins Outstanding Mid-Career Novelist Prize and the Writers' Trust Engel Findley Award. She lives in Southern Ontario, Canada.

Shani Mootoo's profile page

• Short-listed, Scotiabank Giller Prize
• Short-listed, Lambda Literary Award
• Long-listed, Scotiabank Giller Prize
• Long-listed, Scotiabank Giller Prize
• Long-listed, Dublin IMPAC Award
• Short-listed, Ethetl Wilson Prize Fiction Prize
• Short-listed, Amazon Canada First Novel Award
• Long-listed, Booker Prize
• Short-listed, Scotiabank Giller Prize

"Mootoo's artworks, most of which feature some sort of collage and reassembly, shift the effects of memory, of line, of sound, of relation and amplify the transformative possibilities of these poems." —Winnipeg Free Press

"Mootoo uses verse, space and art to create the images and feelings here in the collection, to great effect. . . Holding this book, and experiencing the way the art is laid out on the page was a true experience by itself." —The Miramichi Reader

"Mootoo immerses her reader in Caribbean registers, layering text and family photographs with artwork featuring Hindu goddesses and gods. Making the quotidian sacred, she transports us to a Trinidad where the 'sitar hunts' and 'blind birds flew through cane-fire sweetened air.' Her poetic gift is to teach us how to read anew, trusting the'image-language' of art and poetry to speak of grief, family, and displacement, but also joy and renewal." —Quill & Quire