With uncanny wit, inventive beauty, and numinous surprise, The Most Charming Creatures explores the contemporary and its language, considering our wonder, sorrow, bewilderment, anxiety, and tenderness. While these poems energize and connect and "turn the paren- / theses inside out so that / we mean everything," they are also alive to the alluring complicity of language and its duplicity and deceptions. "This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but / while we watch." A follow-up to the award-winning author's acclaimed selected poems, this new collection continues Barwin's examination of the possibilities of the poem: a celebration, a story, an investigation, a riff, a word machine, a parable, a transformation. But what are the "most charming creatures" of the title? In 1862, scientific illustrator Ernst Haeckel termed radiolarians (ancient single-celled organisms with mineral skeletons) "the most charming creatures," but here Barwin turns the microscope around to consider something just as strange and mysterious: language, our culture, and the self. From microorganisms, onion rings, grief, and Gerard Manley Hopkins to beetles, neoliberalism, sandwiches, Martin Luther, and stand-up comedy, he offers: "it's a miracle that we've survived / it's a miracle that we've survived at all." With uncanny wit, inventive beauty, and numinous surprise, The Most Charming Creatures explores the contemporary and its language, considering our wonder, sorrow, bewilderment, anxiety, and tenderness. The bestselling author of 26 books of fiction and poetry, Gary Barwin has won the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour, the Canadian Jewish Literary Award, and has been a finalist for the Governor General's Award and the Scotiabank Giller Prize. He lives in Hamilton, ON. I won't claim (for Alice Burdick) this is all that happens but I will say it is a true representation of what you see here. By the time you finish reading you will be older. Sadder. Wiser. If you were a flower and you read this, you would be a flower desired by bees. You lie in the green bristles friend to grass, lover of grass, ally of softness and open like petals. That's where the bee gets in, shimmies through pollen. I won't claim the calm of sky but you've got a good view there on the grass and you think what you can. Jams. Jellies. Small faces floating peacefully, closed eyes like petals. It's your brain that's a can. Inside things float that last. Summer song. An old bicycle. Beer. Your children loving you the length of their lengthening bones. You sit to a bowl of clam chowder made by daughter. A hurricane. Sugar cane. Citizen Kane. Abel's brother. Day seeps over one horizon making room for night to pour over the other I won't claim night for dreams where you're double booked for funerals. Goodnight mother. Grandpa. Father. Or that life represents your life. If I had to choose between bee and flower I'd choose summer day. Several Fishes Can Walk on Land the hip bone is a sacral rib within the fish we studied a sacral rider - hello several fjords walk on landslides walk on flashbacks flame-throw latch-key walk languid the hive bookcase is a rifle secretly walking lanterns fistfuls waking landowners flames milling a lasso the hoax cooking is a sacral rig a morphological vehicle that secretly walks on lapels a subject consistency a sacral right-hander that washes larches morphological vendettas secretly wilting lard the hobo shelf is a sacral rigmarole a submarine consonant secretly walloping clerks flash cubes wait laughs secret larval welks a wet-dream larynx the holograph boozer's sacral ring a secreted lash those with the

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