Love & Surgery

First comes love, then comes surgery; complications ensue. The poet describes life events in three acts: the magical courtship and marriage to a woman he met by chance, the subsequent devastation following his third divorce and below-the -knee amputation of his left leg to ease the pain of a congenital deformity. What remains is an elegy to love, loss and letting go.  The poems exist in a kaleidoscopic landscape before concluding with a beautiful homage to Mary Oliver and an acceptance of the existence of psychic and physical pain as a part of life. Love & Surgery is the poet’s third collection in his “Life Studies” including boy (2012) and Lucky Man (2005).

Victor Enns

Victor Enns graduated from the University of Manitoba in 1979 with a History/English major, including the advanced creative writing workshop with Robert Kroetsch, which led to the publication of his first poetry collection, Jimmy Bang Poems (Turnstone 1979). A founding Board member of the Manitoba Writers’ Guild, he was the Executive Director of the Saskatchewan Writers’ Guild from 1982 – 1988 and founder of Windscript magazine featuring the literary and visual art of Saskatchewan high school students. He spent the next 20 years in arts administration while also raising a family, taking time out to found Rhubarb magazine, a literary and visual arts magazine for writers and artists of Mennonite descent in 1998, returning as executive editor in 2012. His most recent collection, Afghanistan Confessions, poems in the voices of Canadian soldiers, was released in November 2014.  boy, was published  in 2012. Lucky Man, was nominated in 2005 for the McNally Robinson Manitoba Book of the Year Award. Victor lives in Gimli, Manitoba.