Johanna Skibsrud is a Canadian-American writer, whose debut novel, The Sentimentalists, was awarded the 2010 Scotiabank Giller Prize, making her the youngest writer to ever win Canada's most prestigious literary prize. Hybrid form, combining poetry and prose styles and borrowing from medieval poetic form. Extends from personal inquiry and experience toward a diverse range of voices, drawing attention to the limits and possibilities of subjective expression and poetic form. Main themes: vulnerability, voice, play and performance, feminism, parenthood, longing, desire, spirituality, subjectivity, materiality, futurity, and the obstacle of language to meaning, dreams or visions, pregnancy or birth. Medium is an innovative new poetry collection from award-winning writer and scholar with international following. It emphasizes the precarious and necessary intersections between different voices, modes of storytelling, historical contexts, and established discourses. Combining lyrical and historical elements, the poems in this collection adapt the medieval poetic form of the Vida--in Occitan languages, meaning simply "life"--to introduce a diverse cast of characters, ranging from Helen of Troy to Mary Mallon (commonly known as Typhoid Mary) to Norma McCorvey (more famous as Jane Roe from Roe v. Wade) to Anne Boleyn.

Vidas were short biographical poems characterized by their unreliability. This new collection of poetry explores and celebrates the lives and perspectives of historical women who have acted as biological, physical, or spiritual mediums over the course of history.