Tia McLennan’s (she/her) poetry has appeared in various Canadian literary journals including Riddle Fence, Vallum, Arc, CV2, Room, and Prairie Fire. In 2022, she won the NLCU Fresh Fish Award for her unpublished poetry manuscript. She holds an interdisciplinary MFA in creative writing and visual art from UBC Okanagan, and a BFA from Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University. Originally from so-called Vancouver Island, B.C., (territory of the K’ómoks people), she now gratefully resides in kalpilin (Pender Harbour), B.C. with her partner, their 5-year-old son and their very large gray and white gentleman cat named Basho.

The poems in Familiar Monsters of the Flood speak to each other through an invisible connective tissue that weaves together dream space, loss, childhood memory, motherhood, the domestic-gothic, medical-speak, and life’s inevitable bureaucracies. These poems share an uneasiness and a foreboding. In these pages it becomes impossible to distinguish between the grief in losing a father, in losing multiple pregnancies, and in losing the planet as we know it to our own destruction. Throughout the deluge of loss, Tia McLennan’s stunning debut collection of poetry is grounded in wonder, the surreal, and the hope gleaned from those peculiar moments that can stop us in our tracks and, for a moment, make us fully present.

“Tia McLennan’s poems are poised at the quick of existence, acutely haunted by both memory and dream, at once familiar and monstrous. The effect is an embodied wisdom-in-progress: startling, revelatory and essential reading.”

—DON MCKAY, author of Lurch

“Tia McLennan’s Familiar Monsters of the Flood is a visceral and wondrous collection that explores the fragility of existence. A spider caught and released. A heartbeat on an ultrasound. Micro-plastics choking the ocean. This is the poetry of the quotidian and the profound, exquisitely noticed and precisely rendered. McLennan’s words are a balm.”

—SHARON BALA, author of The Boat People

“These poems are by turns tender, surreal, disorienting, quietly devastating, and shot through with a ferocious wonder. They inhabit the shimmering logic of dreams and grief, reaching simultaneously towards the death of a father, the birth of an infant, and six miscarriages between. This writing challenges what we know of boundaries between the dead and living, mythical and medical, personal and ecological, between fetal cells and a birthing parent’s body. Visceral individual losses are held in the larger container of destabilizing ecological grief—pipeline hearings, polar vortexes, heat domes, shellfish cooked alive in healing oceans, sun the colour of salmon roe, smoke-filled air. A series of spare found poems, taken from the text of medical records, creates a recurring chorus of cumulative loss. This stunning first collection ‘monsters the familiar,’ and offers a path for being present with the world in times of great grief and wonder.”

—ANNA SWANSON, author of The Nights Also