The Distance of a Shout: Selected Poems

One of Literary Hub's Most Anticipated Books of 2026

A one-of-a-kind collection gathering fifty years of poetry by one of our most cherished authors.

In The Distance of a Shout, Michael Ondaatje has assembled some of his finest poems into a singular poetic memoir that invokes the arc of his own journey over fifty years.

Through poems that grow out of his profound understanding of how we lose and find ourselves, Michael Ondaatje navigates his own past, beginning with memories of his childhood in Sri Lanka and his eccentric family, to his life in rural southern Ontario with its beloved rivers, celebrations of treasured friends, the close ties of children. We follow him through the exhilarations of youth and into that “storm of music,” the passionate swerves of longing and desire, until we reach the calm of that moment when, with “only a cloud’s reflection holding you up, You swim into late afternoon.”

The Distance of a Shout offers us a glimpse into the interwoven life and art of one of our most cherished poets and novelists—and is itself a reminder of the power of poetry to shine a light on living.
Then one summer, Lauren’s husband takes a job in New York and she moves back to Broad Beach Road, back into her childhood home on the shores of Malibu. Lauren looks forward to surfing with her dad again and perhaps repairing an unspoken fracture in her relationship with her mother. What she doesn’t expect is for the boy next to door to return home as well: Stone, Lauren’s first love, who broke her heart nearly a decade before.

As Lauren falls into familiar patterns, with her family and, more dangerously, Stone, she finds herself thinking about all the choices, large and small, that have brought her to this moment. And wondering, finally, if one of them should be undone.