TillingtheDarkness Format: TradePaperback

In Susan Braley’s debut poetry collection, Tilling the Darkness, a young woman born into a family of eleven navigates the inequities of gender roles on the farm and in the church. In this dramatic rural setting―birth and death sudden in the barn, the seasons vivid over the fields―she experiences first-hand how swiftly seedlings become stalks ploughed down, how easily she and her sisters are discounted. Tilling the Darkness explores how we all undertake this tilling ritual, season after season, in the finite field of our lives. Our darkness may be a calamity we seek to escape―a grave, a war, a grief―and our wish is the promise of renewal. In these powerful poems, it is often women who, even in the face of injury and erasure, turn dark to light. Braley’s poetry traces how this woman, after leaving the farm, comes to appreciate the complex, bountiful legacy of her early life.

Susan Braley grew up in a family of eleven on a farm in Southern Ontario. Her life in this rural setting profoundly shaped her as daughter, sibling, feminist, partner, reader and writer. Her poetry is included in Best Canadian Poetry 2023, and was nominated for the 2022 National Magazine Award in Poetry. She was the winner of the inaugural BC Cedric Award for Poetry. Her poetry has appeared in the literary journals Antigonish Review, Arc Poetry Magazine, Canadian Women’s Studies, CV2, The Literary Review of Canada, The New Quarterly, Prairie Fire, and Room; and in anthologies such as Walk Myself Home and Poems from Planet Earth. Her poems have been recognized in numerous writing contests, including Arc’s Poem of the Year. For much of her adult life, Susan lived in London, Ontario, where she earned a PhD in Modern Literature, and taught literature, writing and women’s studies. She now lives in Victoria, BC, with her partner.