Megan Gail Coles

Named after a local word meaning “soaked through” or “weighed down,” Scotiabank Giller Prize finalist Megan Gail Coles’s debut poetry collection, Satched, is a vivid portrait of intergenerational trauma, ecological grief, and late-stage capitalism from the perspective of a woman of rural-remote, Northern, working class, mixed ancestry.

Honest, penetrating, and often darkly comic, these poems explore the extraordinary will it requires to stay alive in the face of economic precariousness, growing inequality, and prevailing dissatisfaction. With a fierce dedication to place, the collection explores the conflict inherent to individualistic priorities and collective needs present in a hyper-commodified Newfoundland and Labrador. Satched demands compassionate advocacy for all as it resolutely strives for clarity and acceptance while celebrating the momentary glimpses of joy in the path toward shared values and resilience.

Reviews
“This collection trills of the [Newfoundland] region and its distinct speech … Coles creates an intimacy in Satched through her urban maritime lens and straightforward style.” — Quill & Quire

“Reading Satched is like drinking chilled wine with an old friend on a hot night, commiserating with love, gratitude, and mutual affection. It’s opening a second bottle, letting the kids fall asleep watching movies, and getting out the hidden cigarettes to really get into it. It’s a fist in the air before it’s aimed at an appropriate eyeball. It’s an exceptional accomplishment full of lyrical strength and poetic endurance.” — Katherena Vermette, author of river woman

“Are you ready for poems that pierce straight to the bone? Megan Gail Coles’s Satched is a razor edge of fierce truth, grim humour, and unalloyed beauty. With sharp-eyed clarity and fearless candour, Coles slices open the veils of capitalism and colonization to reveal a landscape marked by poverty and resilience, violence, and hope. This is Newfoundland and Labrador seen through the eyes of unconditional love and furious rage. The political, the personal, and the poetic interweave seamlessly in this debut collection, adding another genre to Coles’s already impressive repertoire. Satched is the kind of book we need right now, the kind that confronts the real world head-on while also teaching us how to live in it.” — Kai Cheng Thom, author of a place called No Homeland

“Satched is an acerbic, bold, and wise debut that susses out the subtle and sinister ways men infringe on women’s mental and physical spaces, the horrors of the climate crisis, and the pitfalls of economic precarity. With technical mastery and an immediately infectious tone, Coles inhabits the voices of Atlantic Canada, unearths the ways grief inhabits a place, and interrogates prevailing notions of resiliency. Coles intimates both how ‘our minds are poisoned against ourselves’ and the ways in which kinship offers a path to forge through the audaciousness of capital and insidiousness of colonialism. Reading Satched is like talking to your smartest, funniest friend, who wryly declares, ‘there is nothing and no one standing in your way, / except capitalism and global pandemics.’” — Cassidy McFadzean, author of Drolleries

“These poems tumble into me with a rage and beauty that is oceanic. I am satched to the core. Megan Gail Coles writes poems that ask us to reconsider historical and contemporary attitudes toward poverty, race, gender, and the environment, engaging her reader in ‘this present rowing over the past / to make up the future.’ Because while these poems speak deeply to intergenerational trauma, solastalgia, and the systemic ills of capitalism hidden in plain sight, they are forward-looking at heart. Satched puts forth that despite (or perhaps because of) our human frailties, we can begin again. These poems demonstrate that repair is possible, even from a rusty scaffold, if we are willing to reach beyond ourselves.” — Clea Roberts, author of Auguries

Additional Information
112 pages | 6.00" x 8.00" | Paperback

By turns savage, biting, funny, poetic, and heartbreaking, Megan Gail Coles’s debut novel rips into the inner lives of a wicked cast of characters, exposing class, gender, and racial tensions over the course of one Valentine’s Day in the dead of a winter storm.

Valentine’s Day, the longest day of the year.

A fierce blizzard is threatening to tear a strip off the city, while inside The Hazel restaurant a storm system of sex, betrayal, addiction, and hurt is breaking overhead. Iris, a young hostess, is forced to pull a double despite resolving to avoid the charming chef and his wealthy restaurateur wife. Just tables over, Damian, a hungover and self-loathing server, is trying to navigate a potential punch-up with a pair of lit customers who remain oblivious to the rising temperature in the dining room. Meanwhile Olive, a young woman far from her northern home, watches it all unfurl from the fast and frozen street.

Through rolling blackouts, we glimpse the truth behind the shroud of scathing lies and unrelenting abuse, and discover that resilience proves most enduring in the dead of this winter’s tale.

Additional Information
440 pages | 5.25" x 8.00" | Paperback