Monty Reid is an Ottawa poet. He has coupled a 30-year career in museums (Provincial Museum of Alberta. the Royal Tyrrell Museum, Canadian Museum of Nature) with an even longer career as a poet. He has published a dozen full-length collections and almost 30 chapbooks with small presses across Canada and abroad. A new collection, Intelligence 1.1, is forthcoming from the University of Calgary Press and he is currently completing Intelligence 1.2. He worked for Arc Poetry Magazine for many years and was the Director of VerseFest, Ottawa’s international poetry festival, for almost a decade. Now retired, he can be found in his backyard garden, trying to grow peaches.

The garden has contributed significantly to his poetry (see Garden, Chaudiere Books, 2014), but makes an even more substantial contribution to the assemblages Reid now constructs during the winter months - he's in one of the coldest capitals in the world. Intrigued by the interesting garden remains (pods, stems, leaves, bark, seedheads, etc) and building on his 'use every part of the deer' ethos, he began to stick them together into various structures and name them with relevant, sometimes amusing, names. This is their first appearance in a publication. 

Find Monty on BlueSky and Instagram.