Emily Vanderploeg│writer


"...sweet, sharp, and pithy."



- Buzz Magazine on Strange Animals



In these poems, Emily Vanderploeg brings us a menagerie - Hungarian dogs greet you on the Metro with a nod and bears enter wrestling matches; wild boar and turkeys flit past as we swim with whales, are swarmed by gypsy moths, and dream of cicadas. She tells us to sharpen our teeth on a porcupine, look inside a lamprey's mouth, and watch kittens catch refracted light, as we listen for clues in the song of whippoorwills and sandpipers. Charting a journey with these strange animals from Canada to Wales, childhood home to the vagaries of modern love, Vanderploeg explores issues of language, ritual, death and identity. Join her and these creatures as they tell fortunes and guide us to look at life in curious new ways.


Strange Animals, Emily's debut poetry collection, is available now from Parthian Books and all book retailers.


Buy Strange Animals

About Emily



Emily Vanderploeg writes fiction, poetry, and reviews. She studied English and Art History at Queen’s University (BAH) and Creative Writing at Swansea University (MA, PhD), and teaches creative writing to children and adults. Emily is a Hay Festival Writer at Work and recently completed a novel with the help of a Literature Wales New Writer’s Bursary Award. Her pamphlet, Loose Jewels, won the Cinnamon Press Pamphlet Competition and was published in 2020. Strange Animals, Emily's debut poetry collection, was published by Parthian Books in 2022. Originally from Aurora, Ontario, she lives in Swansea.



‘Strange Animals takes you to wild places; from Lake Huron to Swansea bedsits. These are hungry poems; where she plays with all our senses, feeds us chips, Swiss roll, orange peel, Sunday roasts. Discover what she has learned about planting a garden, “the land will remember who it was before the garden”. These poems will leave you full of hunger and love, a travel guide and love story; go with her, and let the “Aurora Borealis call you home”.’



– Jessica Mookherjee, Tigress (Nine Arches Press, 2019)



‘Reading Strange Animals feels a bit like rummaging around in someone's well travelled backpack full of old photographs, seashells, tarot, and countless precious found objects collected for "the passing of knowledge”. A brilliant new voice.’



– Roberto Pastore, Hey Bert (Parthian Books, 2019)



‘Strange Animals is a collection that moves deftly between different kinds of poetic looking: the close up of the personal and intimate, and the longing gaze towards far-away family, language, culture. These are poems of abundance even as they mourn what is lost, charting the reader through gardens and orchards, down urgent green rivers and through teeming swamps, and so often we see the sea – a means to anchor even as it separates the self from what matters most: “that far field”. For all our wandering in the rich landscapes of a remembered natural world, we go inside, too, where another kind of richness awaits. These sharp and surprising poems so often put one in mind of Gwen John's interiors: the beauty and importance of the domestic, and the hard-won rewards found in the self alone. There is heartache here but also a committed hopefulness: these poems have faith that love can emerge in “the space between / the end and the beginning”.’



– Katherine Stansfield, We Could Be Anywhere By Now (Seren, 2020)



‘Emily Vanderploeg’s clear-eyed lyric poetry explores the questions of where we belong, who we have become, and who or what undertakes that journey alongside us. She reflects on a personal and familial history of immigration, acknowledging both the gift and the weight of that history. To read this intimate collection feels like being in conversation with a friend, allowing us the freedom to see ourselves anew, and to welcome our own continuous and surprising changes.’



– Carolyn Smart, Careen (Brick Books, 2015), Hooked (Brick Books, 2009)



Contact



Find Emily on Twitter and Instagram:

@dippy_dumpling