Hymnswitch

"Ali Blythe pierces your skins, awakening perceptions you had allowed to settle under the surface. His poetry moves from spontaneous play to sober reflection, gently capturing our impermanence." — Matthew Heinz

"An intimate, attentive and patiently affecting book that lives up to all of the possibilities of its title. Meditating on time, god(s), gender, sobriety and love, the intelligence at work here is intellectual and emotional — courage in the service of discovery, which at its core is a surrender to vulnerabililty. Mirroring Blythe's speaker, a witness to the transcendant banal, with these poems I too feel my body cultivating a 'readiness/to let unprepared sounds/drown out/the great orchestration.' How much I love this experience of becoming. How grateful I am to Ali Blythe for the 'snowcloud' of this infinite gift." — T.C. Tolbert

"Ali Blythe's Hymnswitch wears the good, solid boots of language to trek through the unsendable here of daily decision. Here the little bent nails of punctuation assemble to testify to the bruised thumbs and split silence of hammerblows and timbercrack. The hands of the clock, like those little nails, tick past in a recitation of clarity." — Derek Beaulieu

"Combining allusions to Greek mythology and reflections on sobriety with references to sex and surgery, his poems entwine multiple processes of becoming, refracting each through the others. Throughout the collection, one finds little moments of linguistic surprise" — Canadian Literature

Ali Blythe is the author of two critically acclaimed poetry collections exploring trans-poetics. About Blythe, Stewart Cole writes, “It’s exciting to see a writer so conscious of building a body of work within and across collections, pursuing not just a set of ideas and concerns but an artistic vision.”

Blythe has held roles as a guest editor of special editions of literary magazines including for The League of Canadian Poets, Arc Magazine, and Malahat Review, and as editor-in-chief for the Claremont Review, an international literary magazine for youth. His poems and essays have been published in national and international literary journals and anthologies, including The Broadview Introduction to Literature, Best Canadian Essays, and Best Canadian Poetry.

Shortlisted: Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize