Notes on Leaving

Winner of the Acorn-Plantos Peoples' Poetry Award

Notes on Leaving is a debut poetry collection that is every bit as captivating, emotive and razor-sharp as Laisha Rosnau’s bestselling first novel The Sudden Weight of Snow.

Rosnau’s poignant poems address life in a startlingly direct and honest voice, employing a robust combination of jaw-dropping forthrightness and delicately crafted verse.

The language of Notes on Leaving is brusque, bright and instinctively fluid: lines and words flow and merge as naturally as they collide head-on. In the world-weary persona of someone who has always found herself on the run, Rosnau energetically conveys sexually charged and angst-ridden desires to urgently abandon a small-town upbringing, among various other lives and identities.

Cutting through time zones that encompass the rural and urban, the remembered and the forgotten, Rosnau tells us to “Pay attention to your surroundings,” to “watch for potential road-kill,” and to “compare scars” along the way.

Reviews + Praise

Rosnau has a talent for building a complete atmosphere in a few simple but sacred-sounding words – The McGill Tribune

The difficulty of humanness – the state of flawed consciousness in which human beings exist – is the key to this collection of poems inspired by memory and imagination. This poet seems to understand the necessary mistakes that people make, and she acknowledges her speaker’s culpability in participating in those experiences that people sometimes learn from, sometimes don’t – a gift indeed. –Foreward Magazine

Laisha Rosnau imparts the subtle sensuality of words mixed with cutting reality. – Quills Canadian Poetry Magazine

In the world-weary persona of someone who has always found herself on the run … Rosnau energetically conveys sexually charged and angst-ridden desires to urgently abandon a small-town upbringing, among various other lives and identities. – Acorn-Plantos Peoples’ Poetry Award jury

That is Rosnau’s poetry – angry, bittersweet, brimming with sex and the need to be noticed, but not in a cheap and easy way. – Prairie Fire