3.0
All We Saw
ByPublisher Description
Poems of elegy in the aftermath of a great love from the internationally best-selling, award-winning novelist (Fugitive Pieces, The Winter Vault) and poet.
In All We Saw, Anne Michaels returns with strikingly original poems to explore one of her essential concerns: "what love makes us capable of, and incapable of." Here are the ways in which passion must accept, must insist, that "death . . . give / not only take from us." This piercing short collection treats desire in a style that is chaste, spare, figuratively modulated, and almost classical in its precision. In lyrics that ponder what happens to the bodies of lovers--so vital when together, different when apart, death coming to one before the other--Michaels embraces both the intimacy and the vastness of the connection between two people. Love's sheltering understanding is a powerful presence in all the poems, with its particular imagery (the ringing fog, the white page of the bed), as is the shattering loss of its end. With Michaels, we enter a space that is "not inside / not outside: dusk's / doorway," where memory might be kept alive.
In All We Saw, Anne Michaels returns with strikingly original poems to explore one of her essential concerns: "what love makes us capable of, and incapable of." Here are the ways in which passion must accept, must insist, that "death . . . give / not only take from us." This piercing short collection treats desire in a style that is chaste, spare, figuratively modulated, and almost classical in its precision. In lyrics that ponder what happens to the bodies of lovers--so vital when together, different when apart, death coming to one before the other--Michaels embraces both the intimacy and the vastness of the connection between two people. Love's sheltering understanding is a powerful presence in all the poems, with its particular imagery (the ringing fog, the white page of the bed), as is the shattering loss of its end. With Michaels, we enter a space that is "not inside / not outside: dusk's / doorway," where memory might be kept alive.
Download the free Fable app

Stay organized
Keep track of what you’re reading, what you’ve finished, and what’s next.
Build a better TBR
Swipe, skip, and save with our smart list-building tool
Rate and review
Share your take with other readers with half stars, emojis, and tags
Curate your feed
Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesAll We Saw Reviews
3.0

Jacob Alvarado 🍁
Created 12 months agoShare
Report

Ali Denno
Created over 1 year agoShare
Report
“Somewhere a woman wakes in the night and knows no one will ever write a poem for her”

vivisectedgirl
Created over 1 year agoShare
Report

Haeon Grace Kang
Created over 1 year agoShare
Report

kellytee
Created almost 2 years agoShare
Report
About Anne Michaels
ANNE MICHAELS is the author of the multiple prizewinner Fugitive Pieces, which was made into a major motion picture, and a second novel, The Winter Vault, which was a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Trillium Book Award, and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, and a nominee for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. She is also the author of several highly acclaimed poetry volumes, the selected volume Poems, and, most recently, Correspondences. Her work has been translated into more than thirty languages.
Other books by Anne Michaels
Start a Book Club
Start a public or private book club with this book on the Fable app today!FAQ
Do I have to buy the ebook to participate in a book club?
Why can’t I buy the ebook on the app?
How is Fable’s reader different from Kindle?
Do you sell physical books too?
Are book clubs free to join on Fable?
How do I start a book club with this book on Fable?