To Love the Coming End by Leanne Dunic

In To Love the Coming End, a disillusioned author obsessed with natural disasters and ‘the curse of 11’ reflects on their own personal earthquake: the loss of a loved one. A lyric travelogue that moves between Singapore, Canada, and Japan, this debut from Leanne Dunic captures what it’s like to be united while simultaneously separated from the global experience of trauma, history, and loss that colour our everyday lives.

Praise for To Love the Coming End:

“Leanne Dunic’s meditative collection To Love the Coming End embodies Yukio Mishima’s characterization of Japan—her writing is at once elegant and brutal. In these fervent poems of disparate landscapes are catastrophic feelings of sadness, loss, and alienation.”
—Doretta Lau, author of How Does a Single Blade of Grass Thank the Sun?

“Dunic has created a collection of tightly mapped poetic fault lines, topographies of loss and absence spanning immense yet intimate geologies, ecologies, astrologies, and geographies. To Love the Coming End insists on an eternal unearthing of memory, a return to remembering, however fleeting.”—Sarah de Leeuw, award-winning author of Geographies of a Lover and Skeena

“Elegant and spare, Dunic’s elegiac writing touches on grief that is both personal and societal. She reminds us that no love is wasted.” —Sarah Yi-Mei Tsiang, author of Sweet Devilry

“From her Vancouver home, Leanne Dunic ventures out across the Pacific, primarily Singapore and Japan, in this book of smartly written, telling prose fragments. The pieces muse on place, presence, distance, the senses, the number 11, longing, loss, love – doing so in a way that each has its own weight and body, yet becomes part of a larger, cumulative whole. In this To Love the Coming End movingly resembles musical composition with its structure, pace, expressive notes. Beautifully done.” —Rick Simonson, Elliott Bay Book Company

Press Coverage for To Love the Coming End:

“A lyric novel, a symphony in poetic prose, the work resides in the interstices of poetry and fiction and from this opening, traverses the fragile physiology of bonds and their ruptures.” —Aja Couchois Duncan, Full Stop

“To Love the Coming End breathes slowly, privately, in the sort of personal moments that are perhaps only possible in a foreign land. Every square inch of blank paper that frames these fragmentary entries conjures the cavern of the unconscious, a world of flickering thoughts, captured shards of memory, epiphany glimmerings.” —Contemporary Verse 2

Poets Resist: Leanne Dunic —All Lit Up

Spring 2017 Books Preview —CBC Books

Year-End Reading: League Staff and Board —Sarah de Leeuw, League of Canadian Poets blog

The Dirty Dozen, with Leanne Dunic —Open Book

BC Poetry 2017: To Love the Coming End by Leanne Dunic —Rob Taylor, Roll of Nickels blog

“Dunic writes of impending natural disasters and impending destruction, questioning how one can continue on such a precipice.” —rob mclennan blog

How naps make poet Leanne Dunic more creative —CBC Books

New Recruits Episode 23: Devra Charney Reads Leanne Dunic —New Recruits

Q&A with Leanne Dunic —Victoria Festival of Authors blog

“To Love the Coming End:” An Interview with Leanne Dunic —Prism Magazine

Best of 2017: Best Poetry Books & Poetry Collections —Entropy Magazine

On Adrian Belew and Defying Expectations by Leanne Dunic —InvisiBlog

Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear —Joy Kogowa House

Transpacific Resonances and Affiliations in Leanne Dunic’s to Love the Coming End and Ruth Ozeki’s the Tale for the Time Being —Michelle O’Brien, De Gruyter

Leanne Dunic is a multidisciplinary artist, musician, and writer. Her work has won several honours, including the 2015 Alice Munro Short Story Contest, and has appeared in magazines and anthologies in Canada and abroad. Based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Leanne is the Artistic Director of the Powell Street Festival Society and is the singer/guitarist of The Deep Cove. To Love the Coming End is her first book. Learn more at leannedunic.com.