Hey there Quill friends! Exciting news!

If you didn’t already know, one of our own is a finalist for the 2011 Trillium Book Awards! Shane Neilson’s Complete Physical is nominated in the English Poetry category!

(You can see all the finalists for this year’s Trillium Book Award on the OMDC website – congrats to everyone nominated! Such a great crowd.)

What’s that? You want to know more about Complete Physical? Of course you do!

Family Physician Shane Neilson has fused his interests and expertise as a doctor with his lyric poetic style, capturing his fascination with love, death, and what it all means when threatened by the news one might receive in the doctor’s office. Shane himself says “Medicine is a means of knowing a person, and some of the poems try to take on the patient’s raiment. Yet they are written from my perspective, and so have a dual life. There are other poems that take on certain diseases, sly poems that try to terrify, although the image of the doctor tempers that terror. And other poems display my misgivings about medicine, about being privileged in the way that we are, to see so much suffering, nobly and ignobly borne. Nobly and ignobly witnessed!”

Reviewers have really taken a shine to Complete Physical too –

‘The book shines a light on the amazing resilience of humans, on unrealistic expectations placed on doctors, on the emotional trauma of treating untreatable pain, on regrets for past errors, on impersonal technology, and on pessimism in the professions…. It is heavy stuff, but achieves much more than therapy for the writer. In its fearless contemplation of pain and death, Complete Physical celebrates the pervasive beauty and power of love.’

—Phil Gravelle, Erin Advocate

Neilson has a talent for powerful compression of language. By which I mean, his poetry can be dense and pack a wallop. When writing about poetry, I always feel I lack a proper vocabulary. I don’t know what to say about Shane’s stuff, except it’s uniquely his, and that’s the mark of a true craftsman.

—Michael Bryson, Underground Book Club

To celebrate the Trillium Book Awards and Complete Physical’s success, we’re giving away a copy of Complete Physical in our (drumroll please) Let’s Get Physical! Contest! (I really couldn’t resist.)

How can you enter to win this fantastic book of poems?

1)      Post an original haiku (by you!) about books in the comments below!

2)      Tweet your haiku to us (@porcupinesquill) or using the hashtag #CompletePhysical2011

3)      Post your bookish haiku on our facebook page!

And for an extra entry, retweet any of our #CompletePhysical2011 contest tweets, or post about the contest on your blog (if you have one! Tweet/comment/email me a link to your post to be sure I’ve seen it!).

Don’t forget, standard haiku are three lines long, with 5 syllables in both the first and last lines and 7 in between! (But free-form haiku are okay too!) Here’s an example:

all-night reading ain’t

insomnia, baby, it’s

just how I roll. Word.

Time to get cracking on your own haiku gems! You have until Thursday, June 16^th, 2011 at 6:30pm EST to “Get Physical” with your haiku for our Complete Physical Haiku Theatre!

The Trillium Book Award authors will be reading at the Toronto Reference Library’s Bram & Bluma Appel Salon on June 16^th – see the OMDC website for details. Winners of the 2011 Trillium Book Awards will be announced on June 17^th!

Want to learn more about Shane Neilson? Check out The Proust Questionnaire on OpenBook Toronto, some of his poetry on the Northern Poetry Review and “Import-Export”, a short story on GEIST.

That’s all for now, Quill friends! Can’t wait to read your haiku!

Porcupette out!

Monique