Mikko Harvey

Let the World Have You

Unstable Neighbourhood Rabbit

The new collection from RBC/PEN Canada New Voices Award winner Mikko Harvey. Mikko Harvey’s new collection invites readers into a world that is and is not the world we know. In poems at once surreal, satiric, and tender, we encounter a cast of surprising non-human characters — the bear who sells herbal remedies, the politically influential lizard, the mean butterfly — yet at the core of this book is Harvey’s impulse to confront the challenges of human intimacy. Let the World Have You is a vibrant report on the ways in which we are delightfully, awkwardly, heartbreakingly entangled: with each other, with the environment we inhabit, and with the psychological environments that inhabit us.

Finalist, League of Canadian Poets’ Gerald Lampert Memorial Award Oneiric, fabulist, hilarious, surreal. No single term seems to sufficiently contain Mikko Harvey’s delightful, cheeky, absurdist, inimitable debut collection. A bomb and a raindrop make small talk as they fall through the air; a trip to the phlebotomist evolves into a nightmarish party; a boy finds himself turning into a piano key. Reading Unstable Neighbourhood Rabbit is like spending the day at the strangest amusement park you've ever seen. At first the rides appear familiar, then you realize they possess the power to not merely thrill and terrify, but also to destabilize your very notion of “amusement.” These poems veer sharply away from what’s normally expected from poetry, landing readers instead in that awkward, lonely, interior space where we may be most ourselves. Along with beauty and humour, there is menace here, the threat of disfigurement and death around every turn. But somehow, Harvey manages to make that menace, too, a place of wonder.

Mikko Harvey

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