Sue Nevill departs with purpose from traditional verse for her second collection. Careening through utterly unique poetic territory, from urban junkets to rural backroads, her images stun the reader with the force of wind against windshield. In four sections "Rain to Dance in at Midnight," "Another Way to Saskatchewan," "Romancing the Stone" and "Forest of Daughters," Nevill moves from the interior landscape of bars and basements to the open road, celebrating the vagabond tradition that hurtles us back in time and forward through generations - at once recovering the debris of earlier journeys and charting the totems and landmarks of a brilliant and personal journey.

I Was Expecting Someone Taller is actually a collection of people: working people, old people, street people, famous people--from Josephine Baker to Baryshinikov, a woman "lunching out" with Jesus to a barfly. These poetic portraits are truthful, sometimes tinged with black humour, other times political. Sue Nevill's people break through the flat, artificial surfaces of typical portraits and give us colourful, three-dimensional views of their unexpected natures.