By Renée M. Sgroi

Twice listed on the CBC’s 2024 Fall Poetry Books to Watch for, and shortlisted in 2025 for an International Rubery Award, Renée M. Sgroi’s second poetry collection, In a Tension of Leaves and Binding (Guernica Editions), examines our relationship to the natural world through the lens of a single garden. From both a human perspective and the imagined voices of plants and animals, these experimental poems work to disrupt our assumptions about poetry, meaning, and language.

Poet and Aeolus House publisher Allan Briesmaster calls this book, “a big, bristling assemblage that is bound to enlighten — and move — its readers multiply, in highly unusual ways.”

International Rubery Award judges write that this book “demonstrates beautifully a deft attention to different ways of writing, different forms and different conjugations of voice, style, image and vernacular.”

Poet Marsha Barber writes that “This book is a wonder, playing with form and language and stretching the boundaries of what the very best poetry can achieve.”

Ed Seaward, author of Fair (Porcupine’s Quill) says: “”For those of you who read poetry, who engage in poetry, I recommend that you engage this book of poetry.”

Kim Fahner, author of The Donoghue Girl (Latitude 46) writes that this book contains: “unexpected ripples of grief that follow a loss, surprising and occurring when least expected. These pangs are not to be mapped or reined in by a contrived socially imposed timeline; the heart simply won’t have it.”