Mad Long Emotion wants to talk flora to fauna like you. It talks by dancing, as bumblebees do. In its dances, loosestrife shoos humans away, green carnations flirt with handsome men beyond the shade, and "dogbanes though dead bloom." Meanwhile, in better-discerned motion, numerous species both spiny and spineless prove invasive, from Great Lake lampreys to hydraulic triceratopses. But they're just looking for better homes. The book concludes with a long poem about distance, desire and the diffic...
Rooms is lyrical and meditative, painterly, erotic and philosophical. The book is thematically and structurally a unity, but a unity of many parts, one and multiple. Rooms, many-chambered, purposeful and highly stylized yet light, light and airy as a beehive. Rooms plays like a late 20th century blues-inflected jazz. There are multiple melodies, linked through motifs and memory: recurrent variations on several themes--childhood, life and death, love, memory and duration. Throughout, you find you...
The city, at once benevolent and indifferent to its residents, is the inspiration for this debut collection of poetry. In the first poem, a young woman arrives in the big city, feeling anonymous and wondering what her life there will bring. The poet builds upon the arrival to develop urban themes of anonymity and collectivity alongside individualist themes of freedom, loneliness, and growing self-identity. Part private reflection, part love letter to the metropolis, the poems pull back the curta...
The dark and surreal take form in the poems of this collection, shifting between humor and horror even while exploring the everyday world—or the everyday as it appears to be. The poet brings the familiar into a different light, revealing the strangeness of what the reader thinks they know, while at other times fully embracing the absurd and fantastic. From the usual thrills and mystery of murder, infidelity, and suicide, the poems also take on shapeshifters, six-legged dogs, fallen cities, and s...
With imagery that is by turns sensuous and rough-hewn, the poems of this collection crackle with energy—they are poems of compassion that demand attention. The poetic landscapes frequent the windswept coasts of Scotland, but inevitably return to Canada, celebrating all manner of the Canadian heartland’s hazards and risks through details of snowshoeing, surveying, and chopping wood. Although deeply personal and intensely emotional, the poems present relationships and connections that have a unive...
A buddy-cop dramedy starring a bottle of Advil and a headache that won’t quit Imagine you’re standing in a room, and someone on the other side of the door won’t stop knocking – ever. Welcome to Andrew Faulkner’s world of the never-ending, low-grade headache, a medical issue resolved only by striking up a committed relationship with the slippery miracle that is Advil. Through direct address, sideways glances, lyrical interludes and deep consideration of what it mean...