The urgency of Confirm Humanity grips us right from the very first page. The poems feel like walking a tightrope across the crevasse created by a maddening world and the dangers inherent in just being alive, while holding love as the balancing rod as you go. The world is complex and entangled with politics, memory, wildfire smoke, and ladybugs. But “the world awaiting us is the one right here,” the author tells the evangelicals at her door, and we feel that, yes, this is exactly what we need to hear.

– Alice Major, author of Welcome to the Anthropocene and Knife on Snow

Filled with wit, warnings and lots of warmth, Kim Mannix’s Confirm Humanity draws on science, social media, Saskatchewan, and past civilizations to contemplate wildfires, a miscarriage, the loss of a parent, motherhood, and the “end of everything.” Kim’s poems—rich with imagery and associative leaps—show how hope can be found in the “smallest affections,” the memories picking berries, the lessons from ladybugs and octopuses, the healing of trees, a mother’s navy cardigan, watching daughters on ice slides, enjoying “the best belly laugh,” or in just waking up eager as “a girl in line for her first rollercoaster ride.”

– Marco Melfi, author of Routine Maintenance

In Kim Mannix’s poems, familiar alarms are sounded in a musical register, with intelligence, tenderness, and—yes, humanity. Mannix meets the current moment with a resonant anguish. Yet in memory, in motherhood, and in love, she also finds “something like wonder / sticking its bony finger in my fat dread.” Confirm Humanity shows us that in the thick of grief or wildfire smoke, poetry is a lamplight to gather in.

– Jennifer Bowering Delisle, author of Micrographia

Kim navigates life’s challenges and tough subjects.  She dives with a vulnerability into her own fears and with gentlest of voices soothes us that we aren’t alone in our own fears and phobias.  “…hold it in the darkness of your throat    speak butterflies.”  She challenges us to examine our own humanity and then confirmed it.

– Daniel Poitras, author of the forthcoming book Frank Oliver Dreams of Amiskwacîwâskahikan

Confirm Humanity by Kim Mannix is that conversation with a dear friend you never want to end. Replete with reverie, reflection, wisdom, wondrous turns of phrase, and lines that beg to be read aloud, Mannix takes her reader on a journey through the ages of life, sharing stories from her own and her childrens’ childhoods. Mannix is, at once, a daughter grieving her mother’s death and a mother holding her daughter’s hand to guide her across a crowded bridge. This book spans the wild and the tame, past and present, the scientific and prophetic, while inviting its reader to always consider what it means to be truly human. It a beautiful “reminder that all creatures are temporary.” Confirm Humanity is an absolute delight, start to finish.

– Ellen Kartz, author of Gravity: A series of I remembers

This is poetry that talks to you, tells stories; it’s poetry of being-with, written in the key of empathy. If you’d like company as you chew over some of the Big Questions in the midst of your daily routines and personal ups and downs, Confirm Humanity can be that company.  If you struggle with how to be hopeful, how to keep your chin up when decisions made by the powerful impose suffering, well, this book struggles too. Like Mannix’s injured impala, who shows an impossible-seeming resilience, her poetry “writhes like a believer / with the gift of tongues.”

– Sue Sinclair, author of Almost Beauty: New and Selected Poems