Read the interview with Monty and an excerpt from Garden

A cycling and recycling meditation on the garden, its edges and ecologies, throughout an entire calendar year. Award-winning poet and under-performing gardener Monty Reid explores and reinvigorates the possibilities of poetic meditation over twelve full months of his home garden in Ottawa’s east end.

Monty Reid is a Canadian poet living in Ottawa. His most recent collection is The Luskville Reductions (Brick, 2008). Recent chapbooks include Site Conditions (Apt 9), Contributors' Notes (Gaspereau) and Moan Coach (above/ground) along with Garden units from a variety of small presses. A three-time nominee for the Governor General's Award for Poetry, his work has won the Stephan G. Stephansson Award for Poetry three times, the Archibald Lampman Award for Poetry in 2007, and was shortlisted for the City of Ottawa Book Award. Much of Garden appeared as Facebook posts in 2012 and his current long work, Intelligence, appeared on Twitter throughout 2013. Other online work can be found at Dusie, elimae, Drain, ottawater, Truck, experiment-o and elsewhere. Recent print work can be seen in The Peter F Yacht Club, The Malahat Review, Grain, Prairie Fire and other magazines. He plays guitar and mandolin with the band Call Me Katie.

Elegant, funny, honestly detailed, and with a great eye on how the specific moment becomes the long-earned truth, Monty Reid's Garden is a wonderful collection of poems. Here is the cultivator's wit around the uncontainable, the worker's modest observance near the abyss and the poet's technical versatility on every page.
- David McGimpsey

As every gardener knows, the garden has a mind of its own. And when the gardener is a poet with a mind as signature as that of Monty Reid, vegetables, ideas, weeds, poems and jack-o-lanterns come together in a profusion of encounters that, far from paradisical, are as complicated, unruly and irreplaceable as life itself. Life is this inconceivable cabbage patch, says Reid, and no reader of this book will wish it otherwise; ostensibly about a garden, these poems are about what it means to be human.
- Mary Ruefle

This is Monty Reid's second title with Chaudiere Books, after his Archibald Lampman Award-winning Disappointment Island (2006), as well as the anthology Decalogue: Ten Ottawa Poets (2006).

FOR PRESS INQUIRIES, CONTACT: rob mclennan / rob at chaudierebooks.com