The Essential Guide to Flight

"A strong first collection from a poet whose clear eye and cool voice combine in poems of clarity, intelligence and occasional startling beauty."
Mary O''Malley

The poems in The Essential Guide to Flight take multiple points of view: they journey through life, through relationships, across borders and oceans, through emotional landscapes; giving glimpses of our hidden lives, the invisible desires and trials that make up a life. They delve into the experience of the immigrant and the cultural outsider. From the opening poem ''The Borrower'', to ''Fireproof'', the poem that closes the collection, these poems examine the myths we invent, myths we have to live up to, and the way we mythologize people, places, and our past.

Celeste Augé was born in Canada in 1972. She was raised in the backwoods of Northern Ontario until her family moved to Ireland, where she has lived since she was twelve years old. In 2006, she published her first chapbook of poetry, Tornadoes for the Weathergirl. Her poetry has also been included in the anthology The Ground Beneath Her Feet (Cinnamon Press, 2008) and in the chapbook Smoke and Skin (Lapwing). She has been Writer-in-Residence with an after-school programme in Galway, supported by the Arts Council and the National Youth Arts Programme. She has read her work at Cúirt International Festival of Literature, at Galway City & County libraries, at Poetry Ireland''s Introductions series of readings, and at other literary events around Ireland. Her poetry was short-listed for a 2008 Hennessy Literary Award. She lives in County Galway.