Book cover art for Karen Enn's book "That Other Beauty"

An exquisitely musical and meditative new voice in Canadian poetry.
In her debut collection, Karen Enns’ focus is the beauty present to us in almost every moment, however mundane or apparently lost. Her argument is that the act of attention itself is the most fundamental of these beauties.

That Other Beauty ranges across memories of a farm childhood, and further back, to the Mennonite exodus from Russia. We encounter immigrants, furnace repairmen and grocers, dead cats, a raven lifting into “the clear, bright density of rain.” Enns meditates on Bach, on solitude, and on exile both accidental and imposed, weaving darkness and light with great fidelity and authority.

Karen Enns published her first book of poetry after working as a classical musician for almost twenty years. That Other Beauty was nominated for the Gerald Lampert Award. Her second collection, Ordinary Hours, was published by Brick Books in 2014. Her poetry has appeared in The Malahat Review, The Fiddlehead, Grain Magazine, The New Quarterly, and The Antigonish Review.

A native of Ontario, she grew up in a Mennonite farming community near Niagara-on-the-Lake. After studying music at Brock University and the University of Western Ontario, she moved to Iowa and then to the west coast of Canada. She lives in Victoria.