Unresponsive - by Kelly Madden (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Unresponsive is a raw, unflinching, and necessary poetry collection that descends into the alleys, shelters and forgotten corners where the addicted, the lonely and the discarded struggle to survive. Urgent in tone and moral clarity, the collection stands as a call to action in the face of the opioid crisis and the growing catastrophe of unhoused life-- issues that have become defining failures of our time. Threading through some of these poems is the profound grief of losing a loved one to suicide; a loss that reverberates and speaks to the collective helplessness so many feel as this crisis deepens. Some of the voices in Unresponsive emerge directly from the poet's lived experience; as a woman in long-term recovery and as a part-time taxi driver, who bears witness to the stories of people who rarely appear in public narratives except as statistics. Their stories, frustrations and resilience shape the emotional architecture of this book, as do the stories of witnesses who are overwhelmed by the magnitude of the problem. Alongside these human portraits are poems that explore our complicated relationship with nature-- its indifference, its beauty and its capacity to heal us. The natural world becomes both mirror and medicine, a place where grief and hope coexist. The collection includes award-winning poems, including one that confronts the ongoing tragedy of the missing and murdered women, and what happens when people fall through social nets with holes too large to catch them. Unresponsive is not simply a book of poetry; it is a reckoning. Urgent, brave and unsparing, it demands that we look directly at what we have allowed to happen-- and insists that we respond. It is a work that will leave its mark.

About the Author

Kelly Madden is an award-winning Vancouver Island poet and fiction writer whose brave and timely work has appeared in numerous publications supported by the League of Canadian Poets: Reckoning 2 & 4, SAPPzine Magazine, Island Writer's Magazine, Contemporary Verse 2, The POET, and numerous anthologies. Her debut collection, If I' d Known (2021), established her as a writer committed to confronting the hardest truths with precision and compassion. Bringing 24 years of sobriety to the conversation, she writes for the hopeless, the addicted, the discarded, and those living in the margins.