When Things Get Worst is the story of a young woman from a world of horse dealers and stone pickers, religious zealots, and gratuitous killers. It is the evocative tale of those who, having lost everything else, retain their dignity in a declining, often dissolute world. Haunted by death and her local history, by religious ecstatics and cynics of the Word, by the repressed who are raping the countryside, as if farms were no more than gravel orchards, this young woman continues to move forward. In the face of the vengeance that others are wreaking on life, she never loses faith in herself, her family, or in the earth, on whose behalf she finally, in a moment of apocalypse, acts. Sensual and perfectly pitched in its depiction of thought in a language that is specific to the rhythms of southwestern Ontario, When Things Get Worst is a moving, lyrical testimony to the force of the human spirit.

Exploring marginal lives and obscured voices through intimate, interior territories that are as much metaphysical as physical, this collection of poetry uses a fresh, cinematic approach to the long poem form and teems with engaged responses to paintings, photographs, and film. With the totemic tattoo and the metrics of flight as governing metaphors, these poems make shamanic forays into psychic spaces and chart the creative effort to recover and restore deep energies.