"The poems collected in this outstanding volume are alive with quirky but resonant phrases ('Gnomes // lazing on pea gravel / beside a breeze-blocked truck'), with haunting character sketches and glimpses into both the mysteries of nature and the whirligig motions of a restless imagination. Surkan slides effortlessly from quotidian scenes into intimations of the sublime, from probes into his personal and family history to witty conjugations of weather and landscape. Elegant, unpredictable, inventive, these poems linger long in the memory." Mark Ford, author of Enter, Fleeing

---

"What is the minimum required?" Reading Neil Surkan, minimum maximizes the elegant, sparing truth in a poetics where each line is drawn to incise, open, lay things bare. "He wonders" the driving force of Surkan's sophomore effort, "Poetry is such a wounded smell. At best, we feel exhilarated by our rootedness," deepened as questions, good questions, 'stream in floods of words that, / like fish scales on furniture, / cling for awhile and shine / the dull way dried tears shine." Here, the promise of Surkan's debut bursts forth. Wonder becomes wondrous, "The still symmetry continues," and baby the infinities shine bright. "Why are you so invested in keeping us alive?" This collection insists we're still breathing, there's a beat. Unbecoming is nothing less than brilliant." Kirby, author of This Is Where I Get Off and Poetry Is Queer

---

"A celery-green river unlocking, fossils chiselled out of rock ledges, third-generation firs - the natural world shifts, is altered, revises itself. In Unbecoming, love is change. Neil Surkan refutes gender scripts, makes visible the tenderness between men. 'I've a new, / unfurling sense,' he writes. Clear-eyed, rich with dazzling imagery, his poems blaze with the elemental: water, sky, land, and love." Eduardo C. Corral, author of Guillotine: Poems

---

"Unbecoming is calm, but never still - every detail buzzes. Inquisitive and playful, these poems wander between generations, between 'days without injury,' between what we hold on to and what we throw away. And yet, 'all we vanished / persists where blue dozed / on old maps: a nurdled / vortex, a snaggled / garbage patch, expands.' To visit the places and meet the people of Surkan's poetry is to be reminded 'how much it means / we get to change,' and perhaps how much we need to change." T. Liem, author of Obits

---

"Neil Surkan's new poetry collection articulates a fierce vision of reality, in which human lives are small and fragile because they exist at the edges of a great natural world in which death is simply a neutral fact. Surkan's poems are surprising, often witty Surkan's poems are surprising, often witty. They move energetically from line to line, doubling their meaning, carrying the reader along with a densely knotted assonance that evokes the rhythms of Anglo-Saxon accentual verse, but Surkan's attention to technique is never at the expense of feeling. In fact, it sharpens and directs each poem's emotional thrust. Hope vies against doubt, while the speaker, ever mindful that he is one among many, asks what it means to be a person and a man - a son, a grandson, a husband, and a father." James Arthur, author of The Suicide's Son

Neil Surkan is the author of the poetry collection On High and the chapbooks Their Queer Tenderness and Super, Natural. He lives in Calgary.

I.
Some Limits 5
The Minimum 6
My Favourite Death Sentence 16
Jericho Beach 17
Renfrew 18
Inside Heaven 20
Reservoir 21
I 23
Witness 24
Gloaming in a Monoforest 26
Ruminant 28
Pioneer 10 29
Infinities 30

II.
Aubade 33
Poetry Workshop with Medical Students 34
Death Perception 35
Bluff 37
Late Style 38
Boomer 39
Tent Caterpillars 40
Span 41
Death by a Thousand 42
Forsakenness 44
Both 45
White Lake 46
The Corn Maze 50

III.
The Infinite Replies 53
Mushroom Picking 54
Ars Poetica 56
Bewilderment 57
Mole 58
In Cell 59
Pathetic 60
Scratched in a Stall on the seasong 61
The Protest 62
A Family Friend Paints Our Hometown 63
Golden Years 65
Silver Lining 66
Paradise 68
Bluff (II) 69
Heaven 70
Faith 71
Anxiety of Influence 72

IV.
Nocturne 75
Shore 76
Pond Life 78
Stranger 79
Strain 80
At Choir 81
The Days without Injury Count 82
McIntyre Bluff 84
Desire Path 86
Outposts 87
Unbecoming 97

Notes 99
Acknowledgments 101

Finalist
W.O. Mitchell Book Prize
The City of Calgary and the Writers' Guild of Alberta
2022

---