Book synopsis:

When the car breaks down we’ll continue on foot, carrying what we can. Meghan Kemp-Gee's lyrics inventory, gather, and artfully frame her loamy raw materials – from clutches of brown eggs and haunted oil paintings to Californian earthquakes and reptilian anatomy. These poems sparkle with vivid, earthy imagery and crafty, voracious speakers who command you to come in the kitchen and sink in your teeth.

Praise for The Bones and Eggs and Beets

When no one is looking, the poems in The Bones and Eggs and Beets get up and dance. They watch and are watched, like the light in a “lost / cubic zirconia fallen from a girl’s / engagement ring”; living on, like all the best art does, in the exigency of its making.

 —Jim Johnstone, author of The King of Terrors

These poems teach us “it is alright to be simple / to do things simply” but there is nothing simple in the way Meghan Kemp-Gee deftly guides us to encounter the multiplicity of meanings hidden within each word, phrase, and line. We’re ushered into the sonorous world of these poems, where the ghostly encounters that populate our everyday lives— “feathery and vengeful things,” eggs and beets, fire and water—show up again and again, each time a little differently. Kemp-Gee pantoums with ease, skillfully playing with an economical vocabulary that overflows with “the full, the fullest” of layered meanings. These poems will haunt you in the best way with every lingering echo.

 —Christine Wu, author of Familial Hungers

A curious look at the familiar, The Bones and Eggs and Beets tenses in unnerving anticipation. Kemp-Gee's poems are thoughtful and observant, strike with a quiet precision. Hiding under covers, underground in soil, in train cars, the question looms: where and what is safety? An uneasy pull between urgency and timelessness.

—Fawn Parker, author of Soft Inheritance

Meghan Kemp-Gee is the author of The Animal in the Room (Coach House Books, 2023) and Nebulas (forthcoming, 2025), as well as the poetry chapbooks What I Meant to Ask, Things to Buy in New Brunswick, and More. She also co-created the graphic novel One More Year. She currently lives in North Vancouver BC.