Murray Reiss has lived on Salt Spring Island, B.C., since 1979. His first book, The Survival Rate of Butterflies in the Wild (Hagios Press), won the League of Canadian Poets' Gerald Lampert Memorial Award for the best first book of poetry published in Canada in 2013. His poetry and prose have been published in literary magazines and anthologies in Canada and the United States, and short-listed for a number of prizes and awards. His chapbook Distance from the Locus was published in 2005 by Mothertongue Press. Reiss brings his poetry to life on the stage as well as the page as a Climate Action Performance Poet and founding member of the Only Planet Cabaret.

Books by Murray Reiss:

About Cemetery Compost:

"Poetry of witness, as Carolyn Forche termed it many years ago, is a prayer against impending and experienced loss. In these poems, much is lost friends, species, even the act of gardening seems a futile process of seeding for yet more seeds but Reiss's poems themselves are the hoarded seeds, finally released to sow his rich, heartbreaking poems on our waiting ears. These poems recall the surreal works of Charles Simic, while pulling past holocaust into present environmental loss. As in the poem 'Baldspot', moments of age, death and loss are carried in the body, releasing the poet to 'write without restraint off the top of my head.'"
—Yvonne Blomer