NOSTOS, Tracy Wai de Boer

Tracy Wai de Boer

Poetry
ISBN-13: 978-1-990293-93-1
$21.95 CDN / $21.95 US | Trade Paperback
May 2025

i came from the sea / first on fins then on fours

Taking its title from Ancient Greek, Tracy Wai de Boer’s Nostos is a hero’s journey rooted in the quest for selfhood from elemental beginnings to an unknowable end. “Nostos” translates to homecoming and is one of the root words of nostalgia; the other, “algos,” means pain, making nostalgia a painful return home. This etymology acts as guide for de Boer’s “i” when she imagines homecoming as less a moment of arrival and more about desire to move through pain and mystery in the formation of self. Nostos is an essential debut from one of Canada’s fastest rising poets.

Praise for Nostos:

Nostos is a visually stunning collection, framed in film photographs that enhance the work’s latent sense of desire and longing. Nostos also surges in waves. It tunes its themes of temporality, growth, and becoming through delicate progression and persistent return. As these poems build, peak, and break in a deliberate syncopation from i to I and back, de Boer’s voice establishes itself as both ancient and domestic, ritualistic and untamed. It’s as if the poems generate etymologies for, of, and against their own creation.—Klara du Plessis, author of Post-Mortem of the Event

In this long-awaited debut, Tracy Wai de Boer’s poems pulse with melancholic longing, as though each word is a fragile echo from the other side. Dreamlike and elegiac, these verses grapple with the ache of loss, the hunger for understanding, and the search for what remains. A well-crafted, haunting, and ethereal journey, Nostos reads with the intimacy of a message in a bottle.—Puneet Dutt, author of The Better Monsters