House of Anansi Press has published #1 National Bestseller and Scotiabank Giller Prize finalist Megan Gail Coles’s debut collection of poetry, SATCHED. Named after a local word meaning “soaked through” or “weighed down,” Satched, is a vivid portrait of intergenerational trauma, ecological grief, and late-stage capitalism from the perspective of a woman of rural-remote, Northern, working class, mixed ancestry.
We’re also extremely pleased to announce an exclusive cover and edition available only at Indigo, which you can pick up in-store or online!
Praise for SATCHED:
“Reading Satched is like drinking chilled wine with an old friend on a hot night, commiserating with love, gratitude, and mutual affection. It’s opening a second bottle, letting the kids fall asleep watching movies, and getting out the hidden cigarettes to really get into it. It’s a fist in the air before it’s aimed at an appropriate eyeball. It’s an exceptional accomplishment full of lyrical strength and poetic endurance.” — Katherena Vermette, author of river woman
“Are you ready for poems that pierce straight to the bone? Megan Gail Coles’s Satched is a razor edge of fierce truth, grim humour, and unalloyed beauty. With sharp-eyed clarity and fearless candour, Coles slices open the veils of capitalism and colonization to reveal a landscape marked by poverty and resilience, violence, and hope. This is Newfoundland and Labrador seen through the eyes of unconditional love and furious rage. The political, the personal, and the poetic interweave seamlessly in this debut collection, adding another genre to Coles’s already impressive repertoire. Satched is the kind of book we need right now, the kind that confronts the real world head-on while also teaching us how to live in it.” — Kai Cheng Thom, author of a place called No Homeland
“Satched is an acerbic, bold, and wise debut that susses out the subtle and sinister ways men infringe on women’s mental and physical spaces, the horrors of the climate crisis, and the pitfalls of economic precarity. With technical mastery and an immediately infectious tone, Coles inhabits the voices of Atlantic Canada, unearths the ways grief inhabits a place, and interrogates prevailing notions of resiliency. Coles intimates both how ‘our minds are poisoned against ourselves’ and the ways in which kinship offers a path to forge through the audaciousness of capital and insidiousness of colonialism. Reading Satched is like talking to your smartest, funniest friend, who wryly declares, ‘there is nothing and no one standing in your way, / except capitalism and global pandemics.’” — Cassidy McFadzean, author of Drolleries
“These poems tumble into me with a rage and beauty that is oceanic. I am satched to the core. Megan Gail Coles writes poems that ask us to reconsider historical and contemporary attitudes toward poverty, race, gender, and the environment, engaging her reader in ‘this present rowing over the past / to make up the future.’ Because while these poems speak deeply to intergenerational trauma, solastalgia, and the systemic ills of capitalism hidden in plain sight, they are forward-looking at heart. Satched puts forth that despite (or perhaps because of) our human frailties, we can begin again. These poems demonstrate that repair is possible, even from a rusty scaffold, if we are willing to reach beyond ourselves.” — Clea Roberts, author of Auguries
Honest, penetrating, and often darkly comic, these poems explore the extraordinary will it requires to stay alive in the face of economic precariousness, growing inequality, and prevailing dissatisfaction. With a fierce dedication to place, the collection explores the conflict inherent to individualistic priorities and collective needs present in a hyper-commodified Newfoundland and Labrador. Satched demands compassionate advocacy for all as it resolutely strives for clarity and acceptance while celebrating the momentary glimpses of joy in the path toward shared values and resilience.
Megan Gail Coles is a graduate of Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador, the National Theatre School of Canada, and the University of British Columbia. She is the Co-Founder and Artistic Director of Poverty Cove Theatre Company, for which she has written numerous award-winning plays. Her debut short fiction collection, Eating Habits of the Chronically Lonesome, won the BMO Winterset Award, the ReLit Award, and the Margaret and John Savage First Book Award, and it earned her the Writers’ Trust of Canada 5×5 Prize. Her debut novel, Small Game Hunting at the Local Coward Gun Club, was a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and a contender for CBC Canada Reads, and it won the BMO Winterset Award. Originally from Savage Cove on the Great Northern Peninsula of Newfoundland/ Ktaqmkuk, Megan lives in St. John’s, where she is the Executive Director of Riddle Fence and a Ph.D. candidate at Concordia University. Megan is represented by Samantha Haywood.