Zachariah Wells

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Zachariah Wells is a Canadian poet, critic, essayist and editor.

He was born in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island (PEI), in 1976, to parents Andrew Wells (a provincial civil servant and policy advisor) and Lynne Douglas (a former federal civil servant and artisan). He grew up in the rural area known as Hazel Grove, living there until he was fourteen, after which he attended high school in Ottawa, Ontario and university in Halifax, Nova Scotia. As an undergraduate, he spent summers (1996-98) working in Iqaluit, Nunavut as an airline cargo handler. After graduating in 1999, he returned to his job in Iqaluit. After a brief stint at graduate school in Montreal, Quebec, he returned to Iqaluit in 2001 and later that year transferred to the remote settlement of Resolute Bay, on Cornwallis Island, where he worked until 2003, when he moved to Halifax with his wife, Rachel Lebowitz.

It was at this point that he started contributing book reviews and essays on Canadian poetry to a number of periodicals, including Books in Canada, Quill & Quire and Maisonneuve. In the spring of 2004, his first chapbook of poems, Fool's Errand, appeared with Saturday Morning Chapbooks on PEI, and in the fall of that year, Toronto's Insomniac Press published his full-length collection of Arctic poems, Unsettled, under Paul Vermeersch's 4 AM Books imprint. In 2004, Wells also started working for Via Rail Canada as a service attendant on board the Ocean Ltd., Via's train between Halifax and Montreal. In 2005, Mercutio Press published Ludicrous Parole, a chapbook of poems. In 2006, he became the Reviews Editor for Canadian Notes & Queries.

In the short time that he has been writing book reviews, Wells has earned a reputation as an intelligent, forthright and sometimes controversial critic, passionate about both his likes and dislikes. His poetry has been widely acclaimed by academics, poets and general readers alike, and has sold very well, by the standards of contemporary poetry collections.