Only Fact

READING WELLWATER, the sixth collection from Canadian poet Karen Solie, comes with a sense of late arrival. Solie’s collection was published in the United Kingdom by Picador in April 2025, more than a year before its appearance with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, which has published Solie’s work in the United States since 2015. What’s more, Wellwater has already made a splash during awards season, winning not only the Governor General’s Literary Award in Canada but also both of Britain’s major poetry prizes, the Forward Prize and the T. S. Eliot Prize. As such, one arrives at Solie’s new collection with a sense that what the poems have to say—their environmental urgency, their place within the poet’s career—has already been decided, that one is entering a territory whose contours have been mapped before you set foot off the boat.