Voicing Suicide is a collection of poems about suicide and its impact on lives. The book arises out of a conviction that poetry offers an opportunity to understand some of the difficult aspects of suicide by allowing us to give it voice; through memory, and elegy, through an honest declaration of the draw of death. In poetry, we can enter the spaces suicide shapes around loss and sorrow and give it voice. Poems can speak to the loss of a loved one, to considering suicide, to struggling to make sense of suicide and poems can offer the words of those who have suicided. Although intense and sometimes painful the book is honest, in moments delicate and tender. It offers an important exploration of suicide by writers who have been close to suicide and speak of it without disguise.

Academic in its origins and final essay, Voicing Suicide is a chorus of voices which sing to the “you” who is gone or within; it is a call to the living spirit; it is an obituary in the language of song to the “latest mammal gone extinct”.
~ Yvonne Blomer, editor of Sweet Water: Poems for the Watershed

Few have been unaffected by suicide. Though considered almost unspeakable, suicide is ubiquitous. Voicing Suicide addresses this dichotomy with poems forthright and personal, meaningful and tender, intimately poetic and intrepid. Not only are the poems, each one, written from deepest heart, but the anthology is also book-ended, Prologue and Afterword, by illuminating insights on the topic. As well, thanks to the editor, Daniel Scott, Voicing Suicide also provides a short guide to relevant resources. This volume is a first, an important book for all of us, those who have been touched by suicide and those who will be.
~ Arleen Paré, Governor General Award winning poet

Daniel G Scott is the current (5th) Artistic Director of the Planet Earth Poetry Reading Series. He has written in a variety of forms but poetry is his long-standing love. He has previously published gnarled love, terrains and Random Excess (with Ekstasis Editions), and black onion and two chapbooks: street signs and Interrupted (with Goldfinch Press). He has individual poems in anthologies and chapbooks as well as numerous academic publications including journal articles and book chapters and, with Shannon McFerran, The Girls Diary Project (University of Victoria, 2013). He won a one-act playwriting competition in New Brunswick in 1984. He is an Associate Professor Emeritus, University of Victoria, School of Child and Youth Care, father and grandfather.