Shadow Blight is an experience of loss and, through poetry, a means of conveying something that would otherwise be too difficult to express. This collection addresses the sensation of being overwhelmed by grief and silenced by the outside world by drawing on the stories of Niobe, whose immense suffering over the death of her children essentially turned her and others to stone.
The book was generally well received. Melanie Brannagan Frederiksen writes in the Winnipeg Free Press, "MacAskill’s resonant use of image and language in both accounts of grief, the mythical and the modern, establishes a plane on which the stories refract one another."[3] In the Ampersand Review, Jacob Alvarado expresses, "Shadow Blight ultimately succeeds on its ability to show its readers its pain and to teach them how to find beauty within it".[4] The Governor General's Literary Award peer assessment committee members Joe Denham and Stewart Donovan stated, “This rare achievement combines formal poetic mastery with honesty and vulnerability.”[5]
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