**Finalist for the 2023 Fred Cogswell Award for Excellence in Poetry
**Shortlisted for the 2023 Fiddlehead Poetry Book Prize
This Is a Stickup is a heart-stopping second collection of poetry from Amber McMillan. Fish and sparrows crowd in the edges of these poems where grandfathers are lost at sea and friends are lost along the way. A strange man peers in her window and flames consume swing sets, while McMillan unravels some of the deep griefs of the world, creating space for the reader to grieve alongside her. Intimate and powerful these poems are unforgettable.
LINKS
Two Poems from This is a Stickup (All Lit Up)
Poem of the Month (Atlantic Books, "September")
48 Canadian poetry collections to watch for in fall 2022 (CBC Books)
**Finalist, 2022 New Brunswick Book Award (Fiction)
**Finalist, 2022 Alistair MacLeod Prize for Short Fiction
A striking original, deftly humorous collection of stories that considers the quest for truth: how we come to it or alternatively avoid it.
A fervently comic debut, The Running Trees leads readers into a series of conversations — through phone lines, acts in a play, and a rewound recording of a police interrogation — to reveal characters in fumbling bouts of brutality, reflection, isolation, and love.
"Amber McMillan's writing balances an eye for the unusual and resiliently beautiful with a sympathy for the frailties common to all her islanders."
—Kevin Chong
"Amber McMillan is a writer I'm watching."
— Michael Crummey
The Woods: A Year on Protection Island is a memoir that probes the sometimes unsettling tenor of life on one of BC's smallest gulf islands. The measure of one's success here, the author discovers, doesn't rely on status or income, but on the ability to adapt to the challenging human community of need, trade, and negotiated civility.
"If you are toying with the notion of island life, McMillan's The Woods is necessary and honest research into the pros, cons and head-banging, eye-rolling panorama of life on a tiny island."
—The Vancouver Sun
"McMillan works to deromanticize the small community. She debunks the myth that the island was originally called Douglas Island, extrapolating the colonial underpinnings of this false history."
—Quill & Quire
A blind boy comforts himself with a telephone’s dial tone and later becomes an international prankster. The discovery of a fox crucified in a toolshed prefigures the breakdown of a close relationship. McMillan’s poems render both the public and the intimate with uncanny precision. They show us how these two worlds influence and invade one another. The flux and flicker of private memories are captured and projected brightly onto a shared, communal space. This is an adroit poetry that moves beyond confession; rather, it first stands witness, and then records, and then transmits its experiences to us like a gift.
“Amber McMillan has a keen eye for the luminous and the absurd. Her directness of address and tenderness of outlook make this book a terrific debut.”
- Sharon Thesen, author of A Pair of Scissors and The Good Bacteria
LINKS
"Claire Kelly on the 'deliberate and unwavering' poems in Amber McMillan's We Can't Ever Do This Again" (Claire Kelly, CBC Books, 18/04/2019)
Most Anticipated: Spring 2015 Poetry Preview (Kerry Clare, 49th Shelf, 26/01/2015)
Read the first few poems in We Can't Ever Do This Again
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