?Attachment is the puzzle. Three years after her mother's death and on the brink of a break up, a bisexual writer sits in the company of an urban birch tree, auditing the odds of new loves entering her future. So begins Dear Birch, an intimate poem cycle that improvises within the permutability of grief, wind, reading, refusal and desire, listening for an ethos of ongoingness. Synthesizing memoir, votive and epistle, Margaret Christakos displays her trademark fidelity to writing as attentive process, imbuing her work with the polyamory of tender intelligence.

Margaret Christakos is a widely published award-winning poet, fiction author, critic, and creative writing instructor. Her work has won the ReLit Award for Poetry and the Bliss Carman Award, has been nominated for the Pat Lowther Award twice, and was shortlisted for the Trillium Book Award. She was appointed Canada Council Writer in Residence at the University of Windsor in 2004?2005, served as Canada Council Writer in Residence at Western University (London, Ontario) in 2016?2017 and at the University of Alberta in 2017?2018, and as Barker Fairley Distinguished Visitor at University of Toronto (2018?2019). Her recent publications include Charger, a poetry collection published by Talon Books (2020) and an intergenre memoir, Her Paraphernalia: On Motherlines, Sex/Blood/Loss & Selfies, published by Book*hug (2016). In 2017, Wilfrid Laurier University Press published Space Between Her Lips: The Poetry of Margaret Christakos.