“In an interview after winning the 2017 RBC/PEN Canada New Voices Award, which goes to an unpublished Canadian writer under the age of 30, the Brooklyn-based poet Mikko Harvey commented that, to him, poetry is “like a secret personal playground.” He opens the gates to that playground in this debut collection, in which the whimsical and the macabre mix in startling ways. A bomb and a raindrop chat as they fall earthward in the first poem, “Autobiography” (a title that signals the poet’s offbeat sense of humour). Many of the poems move from innocuous absurdity to horror, as in “Bird Call Association,” which starts out with members of the association making bird calls and ends with a ritualistic killing. There are surreal scenarios aplenty, but also poems that slyly explore social awkwardness (in one poem, intimacy is “a land of risk”). Bizarre but compelling, Harvey’s poetic playground is fascinating territory.” —Toronto Star
“Unstable Neighbourhood Rabbit is an exceptionally pleasurable reading experience… Harvey’s poetry defies every ordinary scope of the imagination.” —Kenyon Review
“Unstable Neighbourhood Rabbit is a startling debut… There’s a soft sadness underscoring even the silliest event in Harvey’s surreal world.” —Winnipeg Free Press
“Mikko Harvey’s Unstable Neighbourhood Rabbit’s exorbitantly dark-hearted conception of masculinity encourages a series of strange and haunting episodes. His casual, flippant, almost anecdotal observations turn at the end into violence or expand their edges into the ridiculous. Harvey’s men are brooding automations and violent impassives, and the adventures he sets upon them are wild technicolor nightmares. The book is at home in the Canadian surrealist tradition but unique for just how goddamned punishing it is towards its subjects and speakers. Unstable Neighbourhood Rabbit is—in the best sense—a vicious work, pitched to the register of a horror film. Its effects are lasting and profound.” —Jury Citation, Gerald Lampert Memorial Award
“These poems stand out for their commanding execution of a particular kind of disaffected energy; each poem, for all its nonchalance, leaves me feeling startled. ‘You’re losing control,’ the speaker proclaims to his reflection in a spoon, but in fact these poems know exactly what they’re doing.” —Natalie Shapero
“In Unstable Neighbourhood Rabbit, as it should be the case, natural elements act like neighbours and old friends, people act like animals, animals act like people, names determine fate, rice and goats and bowls determine how we interpret the world, our palms control our thinking, our imaginations are celebrated and called upon to take responsibility for what they call into existence, our imaginations transform us as necessary, everything is a sign, everything is heroic and epic and fragile, everything matters, the wind can undo our shoelaces.” —Dara Wier
“All words are adult, said Maurice Blanchot. And this book is saying to words (like “nature”) die! *gently* die! And be born again: babies, children, reindeer. So, don't read this book if you don’t want to think like a child (and don't read this book if you don’t think childthought is absolutely magnified). Don’t read this book if you don’t want to lose your I. Don’t read this book if you don’t want to cry.” —Darcie Dennigan