By Dale Tracy
This first collection by Dale Tracy is the atmosphere that derelict bicycles breathe. Like weeds, ones we’ve built, they burgeon. These poems wonder what sort of a performance thinking is—they perform their own logical hysteria, that emotion that feels what the other emotions feel like. Unconventional but interested in convention, they turn the world in on itself until “[i]t’s almost like a curtain / has been pulled and it’s a different world. / A curtain has been pulled, but I can’t see the curtain.” Dale Tracy mines the intersection of the surreal and the philosophical, with a sprinkling of Samuel Beckett and a dash of Hélène Cixous. Tracy is a fresh, original voice in Canadian poetry, locking her startling surprises and beautiful enigmas in quiet but emphatic lines. Each poem in Derelict Bicycles takes things too far, to the edges of its own form.
A FEED DOG BOOK.
Dale Tracy is the author of the chapbooks The Mystery of Ornament (above/ground press, 2020) and Celebration Machine (Proper Tales Press, 2018), the chappoem What It Satisfies (Puddles of Sky Press, 2016), and the monograph With the Witnesses: Poetry, Compassion, and Claimed Experience (McGill-Queen’s, 2017). Her poetry has appeared in filling Station, Touch the Donkey, and The Goose: A Journal of Arts, Environment, and Culture in Canada, among others. She is a faculty member in the English Department at Kwantlen Polytechnic University and lives on unceded Coast Salish territory. Derelict Bicycles is her first full-length poetry collection.
