Karen Houle"s Ballast draws us in to a strange, elliptical world. Houle"s poems are often ordeals deriving their materials from the natural world; they form an archive, an entomology, geology, and ornithology. They are about spaces, about contact, about the position of objects, and about relationships. And they are spoken with a voice forceful in its intelligence, explosive in its language, and so inventive as to signal the arrival of an important new Canadian poet.