Successful Tragedies

Canada’s Priscila Uppal (1974-2018) gained an international reputation for her boldly provocative poetry in just a dozen years, following the publication of her first collection, How to Draw Blood from a Stone, at the age of 23. Noted for their startling imagery, unforgettable characters and visionary lines, her poems are exact and penetrating, yet surreal and deeply moving. Drawing from the scientific to the literary, the medical to the historical, Uppal was as concerned about the inheritance of the past as she was about the tragedies of the present, making her both a witness of the terrors and inconsistencies of the past and a messenger of an incomprehensible future. Successful Tragedies includes work from six books published in Canada, including Ontological Necessities, which was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2007, and her latest collection, Traumatology. In these poems she meditates over spilt milk with Freud, has sex with Christopher Columbus, issues warnings to gynaecologists, sets up shelters for virgins from Greek myths and organises a protest on Abraham’s lawn, and much more… Readers experiencing Uppal for the first time will enter a turbulent but vital landscape, discovering a poet dedicated to uncovering the motivations behind our cruelties and our compassions and determined to explore the absurdity of the world.