Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Empties

Empties

Surkan, Neil

Paperback

Series: Hugh MacLennan Poetry

General Poetry

ISBN10: 0228027314
ISBN13: 9780228027317
Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
Published: Mar 17 2026
Pages: 104
Weight: 0.20
Height: 0.40 Width: 4.60 Depth: 7.30
Language: English

Yes it is both river and sea / yes they mingle together here / yes one empties for the other / yes it tastes like tears

In a powerful interplay of striking descriptions with tender intimations, Empties, Neil Surkan's third poetry collection, reckons with fatherhood in a depleted and collapsing environment: Is it possible to nurture new shoots while the fires close in?

Feelings of emptiness, acts of emptying, and physical empties coalesce in these vivid and timely poems. Through a queer lens, Surkan's speaker scrutinizes masculinity and fatherhood as he confronts the necessary emptiness that comes with becoming someone's ancestor. Arrays of drained and discarded entities - empty bottles, broken pots and cups - summon a world, husked and untenably extracted, that teeters toward collapse, but even those empty spaces are receptacles for fleeting moments of vulnerability and tenderness. At its core, Empties explores the conditions of life on the verge of hopelessness. It finds, among shadows of doom and despair, unlikely but nonetheless inevitable reasons to hope.

These are poems that teach endurance in the face of all that won't / be saved while still finding much in the world to cherish / as it brinks. In direness, there is also awe: one mustn't forget, Surkan reminds us, that only empty bottles can sing.

Also from

Surkan, Neil

View All

Also in

General Poetry

View All