The Reign

Shane Neilson brings lavish language and an empathic imagination to a neglected pocket of New Brunswick history. He mythologizes and invents in ways that don’t abstract from but honour the real lives of the displaced people who have inspired his story-making. Combining political critique, alertness to disability, and a high-lyric sensibility, The Reign is absolutely riveting, one of Neilson’s most powerful poetry books to date. — Sue Sinclair, author of Almost Beauty

I’ve never read anything like Shane Neilson’s The Reign. These feral poems startled me: I was a deer before a hunter. Somewhat narrated by a “nearmute scholar of place” named Willard, a non-binary King Lear, The Reign puns on a kingly reign at odds with the ubiquitous rain and perhaps even the inborn reins that reign in nature. Forests speak. The moon declaims. Deer discourse. The line between human and animal blurs in a Caliban lyrical mash-up that includes fracking, which our poet aligns with Philip Larkin’s favourite four-letter word. Sexuality is grafted onto nature in lines such as this from the forest: “I’m late-season sap/dripping from water-split bark. I’m clogged syntax that mimics the internal/pressure of trees.” Frisky poems leap like stags and does across the pages, sweating in their pelage, shaking in estrus, smelling of scat, rutting. There are two strategies for a poet: go wide or go narrow — Whitman or Dickinson — drag the whole world in or burrow deep into a narrow particularity. Neilson goes through Whitman’s capacious door. His Canadian poetic collage is wholly original. Part T.S. Eliot’s Wasteland, part Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, part W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants — The Reign deploys photography, footnotes, a family tree of antlers, newspaper factoids, stage dialogue, mathematical equations, words running helter-skelter on the page, and emojis to illustrate this maker’s eco-poetical claim that humanity ruins nature. How to stop greed and commerce from blotting out the world God gave us? Shane Neilson is Gerard Manley Hopkins streaking through the woods. As Neilson writes: “All I’ve ever loved was dirty, flawed. Hard. Grown over with moss. Too dangerous to use well or easy. Raw, wild, and right.” Read this fecund book: run, rut, resurrect, riot, rattle, roll, roil, rejoice, reread! — Spencer Reece, author of Acts

The Reign extends and builds on New Brunswick, but the words “extends” and “builds” hardly do justice to a book that is so vitally charged with originality, that is relentless in its inventiveness, unapologetic in its strangeness, and deeply compelling. — The Temz Review

“A tale of land, love, and language, The Reign defies genres, keeping readers guessing at what will happen next.” — Hamilton City Magazine

Shane Neilson (mad/autistic) is a poet born in New Brunswick whose work is inspired by rural land lapped by the Saint John River. He is the author of more than a dozen volumes of poetry and prose, including You May Not Take the Sad and Angry Consolations (icehouse poetry, 2022). Amongst a long list of accolades, Shane's work has been awarded the Hamilton Book Prize and the Miramichi Reader Book of the Year. He has also been nominated for the Trillium Poetry Prize. His poetry has appeared widely in international publications such as POETRY (US), Prairie Schooner (US), and Magma (UK). In 2025, he is serving as a judge for the Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine.