Slow-Moving Target

"Hear the rustle all down the block as people unwrap the box of the Fifties. Life will be a clock, a pet, it will wag its tail and lie down. Food will glisten in mounds on the breakfast tables and skirts will go taffeta-taffeta." -- from "Aldredge Place"

In her second book, Slow-Moving Target, Sue Wheeler unwraps more than the Fifties. She unwraps a whole shopful of environments and events, and winds them up and sets them down to delight her readers. There is no sentimentalizing here - either of people or of other places and times - and yet the writing is so consistently sharp, perceptive, and clear, that the overall direction is always towards hope, towards the light.

"Here is a poet who keenly observes the world and its people with humour and love. I will return to these pages again and again for their verbal surprises and unflinching honesty. While highly intelligent, these poems are not intellectual; they speak to us in language that packs a passionate wallop." - Patricia Young

Born and raised in Texas, Sue Wheeler now lives on Lasqueti Island, off the British Columbia coast. She is a past winner of the Gwendolyn MacEwen Memorial Award and of the 1994 Malahat Long Poem competition. Her first book of poems, Solstice on the Anacortes Ferry, won the Kalamalka Press New Writers Award. Kristjana Gunnars called that book "an amazing journey around the physical as well as the emotional world."