Poetry
Pub Date: April 23, 2022
5 X 8  in | 80 pgs
Trade Paperback: 9781988989433 
e-pub: 9781988989549

Nyx Lewis-Schmidt plows through the distorted shrapnel of trauma dormant and still tingling.

Claimings and Other Wild Things is a brave debut poetry collection which delves into a catalogue of personal struggle and identity, all the while inviting readers to imagine the "prophet in the dirty motel" or "the illusion of soft flesh giving way" or the pent up rage of a "boxed-up grenade sent round trip".

This is poetry of exactitude -- honest, at times tender, a collection which reminds us how life's obstacles inform the accruing intensity of being human in the twenty-first century.

About the Author

Nyx Lewis-Schmidt is a queer, non-binary poet. A graduate of Western University and a recipient of Alfred R. Poynt Award in Poetry, the Margeurite R. Dow Canadian Heritage Award and the Western Gold Medal. Their poetry can be found in Symposium, Frankenzine, Common Mag and Déraciné Magazine. Claimings and Other Wild Things is their debut collection. They live in Sudbury, Ontario with their partner and two cats.

Praise for Claimings and Other Wild Things

"Claimings And Other Wild Things is a beautiful and terrifying exploration of physicality and domesticity with diction so delicious and delightful, one almost forgets the haunting images it allows us to witness. Schmidt's poetry invites us to see body as nature; body as memory; body as machine; body as perpetrator; body as hiding place, a cage made of bones and ligaments. A chilling and impactful debut that demands remembrance." 

⸺ Sydney Hegele, author of The Pump

"Schmidt’s poetry is skilled, interrogating its themes in terms of form and voice that hits to the bone and vibrates with life.“

⸺Matthew Walsh, author of These are not the potatoes of my youth, finalist for the Trillium Book Award for Poetry and Gerald Lampert Memorial Award

"The collection is lyrical, verging on confessional, dancing through the effervescence of thought, and landing for brief moments on memory, exploration, finding, and changing, before continuing to flow forward. Pushing against but never resting on structures of contemporary spoken-word poetry, Noelle Schmidt’s speaker loudly asks poignant questions of the world around them.”

⸺Meredith Grace Thompson, Cloud Lake Literary