Of Ukrainian and Polish ancestry, Andrew Suknaski was born in the small farming community of Wood Mountain, Saskatchewan, in 1942. He is the youngest of six children born to Andrew Suknaski, Sr. and Julia Karasinsky Suknaski. As he records in a poem dedicated to his first-grade teacher, he did not learn to speak English until he entered "grade one at Parker Bluff School." In the mid 1970s, Suknaski returned to Wood Mountain to become the poet of that place in all its history, both immigrant and native, but in his youth he sought to escape what he felt were its stifling mores.

He left in 1959, to spend the next seventeen years wandering in Canada and various parts of the world as an itinerant laborer, sometimes student, and apprentice poet. After a stay in the Rocky Mountains, he finished high school in Nelson, British Columbia, where he also attended the...