Don McKay has published nine books of poetry, including Birding, or desire (1983), Sanding Down This Rocking Chair on a Windy Night (1987), Night Field (1991), Apparatus (1997), and Another Gravity (2000). He is also known as a poetry editor, and he has taught poetry in universities across the country. He presently lives in British Columbia.

"There's a place / between desire and memory, some back porch / we can neither wish for nor recall,” writes Don McKay in Apparatus. The poems in this collection home in on that place - those keenly desired places - where language will not reach. Apparatus is Don McKay's first collection of new poems since his 1991 award-winning Night Field. It is a passionate engagement with nature and a powerful critique of human assaults on wilderness which, for McKay, is more than unsubdued nature; it is whatever eludes the mind's categories - the insoluble secret of life itself. To read McKay's poems is to be in touch with the significant concerns of our time and all time. McKay is a poet of unmatched linguistic playfulness, with virtuoso flexibility of voice and an ability to shape-shift through forms, tones, and styles.