The poems in Catastrophe Theories reflect an increasingly unstable, surreal, and catastrophic world. Written over the past decade, the poems in Mari-Lou Rowley’s oracular work capture the zeitgeist of the moment. A world where human folly and frailty compete with corpocracy and technological determinism against the stubborn magnificence of the natural world.
Rooted in the back alleys, squats and psychiatric wards of contemporary Vancouver and Montreal, these unyielding poems enter the intersecting tensions and intensities in characters such as Mike, a panhandler on Vancouver’s Commercial Drive, Matthew, a runaway punk, and Dara, a single mother.
Heavily inspired by cante jondo (Spanish “deep song”) and Portuguese fado, these poems explore the kind of yearning that is contained in the Portuguese word saudad: a longing for something in the past that can never be found because time has shifted everything away from what it was.
By John Creary
Sharp with insights that cut to the core of the matter, the poems in Escape from Wreck City – like the people who inhabit them – are ecstatically alive.
By Jeff Steudel
Foreign Park situates itself in an epoch where prior assurances of the natural world’s solidity begin to slip. Poisons enter the Fraser River Basin.
In Greek mythology the Muses preside over the arts and inspire writers and artists to produce works of genius. In Frenzy, Catherine Owen pays homage to the muse in a six-part compilation of muse-quests, some the author’s, some those of others. These muses can be a person, a place, or even the absurdity itself of indefinitely seeking the muse.
By Lyle Neff
Full Magpie Dodge is about the shiny brightness of modern urban life, its pressures and joys. More-or-less artful dodgers populate its pages, along with office workers, crows, exhausted junkies and jubilant lovers.
Galaxy is “emotional biography”—as Magaret Laurence called it—(Sometimes I have breathed flame, / I admit that my words—provoked— / have burned) where the facts are fabricated (“tell it slant,” said Emily Dickinson), but the feelings are authentic.
