elinat

The poems in this new/old collection are by turns personal and public, surreal and naturalistic, musical and plain-spoken. But all explore the liminal regions we live in every day, too often unconscious of what we’re finding there.

The events that transpire that evening force each townsperson to look long and hard at themselves, at their own identities, and at the traumas and experiences that have shaped them. Told from multiple perspectives, Saltus reveals the complexities inherent in accepting the identities of loved ones, and the tragic consequences that unfold if they are ignored.

The poems in If, When link the author’s contemporary experiences while living in Squamish, British Columbia, with those of her great-grandparents, who lived in the nearby mining town of Britannia a century earlier.

A book about the songlines of memory and language and the ways in which they connect us to other human beings, to read Strangers is to become part of the lineages (literary, artistic, familial) that it braids together—to become, as Richard Outram puts it, an “unspoken / Stranger no longer.”

More than any of his previous books, though, Smithereens features poems that are playful, in which language is often associative, surprising and fun.