ISBN:
9781772016048
Pages: 133 pp
Pub. Date:
April 2 2024
Dimensions: 9" x 6" x 0.5"
Rights: Available: WORLD
Categories
Poetry / POE024000
Winner of the 2025 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize!
In wet, a transient Chinese American model working in Singapore thirsts for the unattainable: fair labour rights, the extinguishing of nearby forest fires, breathable air, healthy habitats for animals, human connection. She navigates place and placelessness while observing other migrant workers toiling outdoors despite the hazardous conditions. In photographs and language shot through with empathy and desire, wet unravels complexities of social stratification, sexual privation, and environmental catastrophe.
"Direct and unsentimental … an accessible and thought-provoking balm." – Susan Sanford Blades, BC BookWorld
"wet moves with the clarity and patience of water itself, layering observations of place with intimate reckonings of identity. Dunic’s poems are simultaneously tender and unyielding, offering a lens on how the personal and ecological intertwine. The poems in wet are attentive and crisp, balancing images with undercurrent, unflinching in their keen observations. In this book we are ferried along by Dunic’s compelling voice, her searching and knowing ‘eye’ and the narrative’s unbridled propulsion. This is a work that holds and troubles the false binary between the banal and the extraordinary, that navigates stakes and ennui with a recurring ethic of care – for human and animal others, for the planet, and for the self moving across it." – 2025 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize Jury (Tara Borin, Aislinn Hunter, and David Ly)