Lunar Tides by Shannon Webb-Campbell

Expansive and enveloping, Webb-Campbell’s collection asks, “Who am I in relation to the moon?” These poems explore the primordial connections between love, grief, and water, structured within the lunar calendar.

The poetics follow rhythms of the body, the tides, the moon, and long, deep familial relationships that are both personal and ancestral. Originating from Webb-Campbell’s deep grief of losing her mother, Lunar Tides charts the arc to finding her again in the waves. Written from a mixed Mi’kmaq/settler perspective, this work also explores the legacies of colonialism, kinship, and Indigenous resurgence.

Lunar Tides is the ocean floor and a moonlit night: full of possibility and fundamental connections.

Praise for Lunar Tides

“In Lunar Tides, Shannon Webb-Campbell exposes a heart that’s broken but also carried across the gulf between the moon and the sea, a heart that knows how “grief takes up with the body.” She shows us that grief is tidal, its ebb and flow pulsing like the moon and dog-earring our memories. This book reminds us that, grieving or not, we “need to be held by something other than a theory.” —Douglas Walbourne-Gough, author of Crow Gulch

“There is an arc of light in Shannon Webb-Campbell’s Lunar Tides that passes through a mother’s death, a poet’s birth, and the moon in orbit over the Atlantic. These are poetics of nature told from the lip of Eastern Canada where a desire to know reveals a desire to remember. ‘Life becomes a quest of origin,’ the poet tells us. And in this way, we are shown how even grief can be transformed.” —Tawhida Tanya Evanson, author of Book of Wings

“Lunar Tides is both expansive and exacting, inviting us to feel our own relationship to the ocean, belonging and mortality.” —Shalan Joudry, author of Walking Ground

Press Coverage:

Read ‘Tides’, an excerpt from Lunar Tides: —League of Canadian Poets

Shannon Webb-Campbell on How Kathleen Hanna, Sylvia Plath, & Elizabeth Bishop Became Her Early Guides to Poetry —Open Book

“Webb-Campbell explores the idea of ‘mother’ as meta-origin birthplace/home and also the literal mother of the poems’ speaker, who is grieving her own mother’s death.” —Angela María Spring, The Washington Independent Review of Books

Most Anticipated: Our Spring 2022 Poetry Preview —49th Shelf

“The structure of the collection, following as it does the waxing and waning of the moon, the ebbing and flowing of the tide, both reinforces the ongoing harm of colonial and capitalist ways of thinking, ways that insist on a tidy and timely resolution of grief and, later in the collection, assembles an alternative vision: ‘Learn that loss has its own time, and you are a small animal reeling.'” —Melanie Brannagan Frederiksen, Winnipeg Free Press

“The poems in Lunar Tides seek to define grief, and ultimately find a path toward healing. We, all of us, have two mothers: Our human mothers, as well as our Mother Earth. To understand that connection is to understand ourselves.” —Roses and Reviews

36 Atlantic Canadian books that are generating buzz this spring —Atlantic Books Today

Author Spotlight Series: Shannon Webb-Campbell —My Entertainment World

Leos, Lovers, Loss – and Lunar Tides —Getting Lit with Linda – The Canadian Literature Podcast

Shannon Web-Campbell talks to Sharon Berg about her latest poetry collection —The Artisanal Writer 

Today’s Poem: ‘Lemon Came in the Night’ from Lunar Tides by Shannon Webb-Campbell —Poetry Daily

“Lunar Tides is a poetry collection that I would recommend to readers looking to explore the meaning of grief and grieving or to those who want a better understanding of how the moon cycles influence us in our daily lives.” —Kaylie Seed, Cloud Lake Literary

Spotlight on Poetry —Louise Bernice Halfe – Sky Dancer, 9^th Parliamentary Poet Laureate, Parliament of Canada

CLC Brown Bag Lunch Podcast: Episode 5 – Shannon Webb-Campbell

Poem of the Month —Atlantic Books Today

Our Favourite Book Covers of 2022 —Hamilton Review of Books

“What rises above everything else in this collection of poems is the deep love that is woven into all of the poems. How does a daughter remember and mark her mother’s life? Webb does this beautifully in Lunar Tides, not flinching or avoiding death or loss.” —Kim Fahner, periodicities

Shannon Webb-Campbell is a mixed Indigenous (Mi’kmaq) settler poet, writer, and critic. She is the author of Still No Word (2015), recipient of Egale Canada’s Out in Print Award, and I Am A Body of Land (2019; finalist for the A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry). Shannon holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia, and a MA in English Literature at Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador, and is pursuing her Ph.D. at the University of New Brunswick in the Department of English. She is the editor of Visual Arts News Magazine. Shannon is a member of Qalipu Mi’kmaq First Nation and lives in Kijpuktuk/Halifax in Mi’kma’ki.