The Vivian Poems

These poems peel back the layers of suburban life and the American Dream. Vivian Maier was a self-taught street photographer who worked as a nanny for wealthy employers in New York and Chicago. The poet imagines her as a documentarian who is compassionate, abrasive, and meditative, while her subjects provide their own narrative. More than anything, the poems are a response to her work, which is all we have that comes directly from her. It is a deliberate challenge to the “mystery nanny” she is reduced to in much of the constructed narrative of her life.

Bruce Rice

Bruce Rice is a writer and editor living in Regina. He writes about community, reclaiming the voices of those who live on the margins, and how we are transformed by landscape even as we leave our footprints on it.  He has five award-winning books of poetry. He received his second Saskatchewan Book Award for his most recent collection, The Trouble With Beauty (Coteau). In 2019 he was appointed to a two-year term as the Saskatchewan Poet Laureate.