Complicity
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- $6.99
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
A dazzling and exhilarating new collection of poetry from an award-winning Canadian poet. For fans of Ken Babstock, A.F. Moritz, and Karen Solie.
Award-winning poet Adam Sol's fourth collection is a meditation on complicity. By turns intimate and lyrical, experimental and outlandish, the collection focuses us on how we cannot escape the troubling structures that determine our lives. How do we identify ourselves with communities - national, cultural, or local - while aware of the violence which underlies their arrangements? How do we pursue love when we know how fraught and imbalanced gender politics is? How do we continue to value art despite the prevailing rhetoric that considers it a marginal discourse? The poems are funny, allusive, off-kilter, and sonically rich, while crucially interrogating, lit with, the contemporary ethos.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In his fourth book of poetry, Sol (whose Crowd of Sounds won the 2004 Ontario Trillium Award for Poetry) vacillates between empathy and guilt as he explores trends that have come to define contemporary culture. The opening poem, "Dwarf," sets the tone for the collection, fusing meditations on art, politics, and planetary nomenclature. The planet in question is Pluto, which has been "demoted to a dwarf planet/ by the IAU's Working Group on the Definition of a Planet." As the poem reaches its climax, Sol bends these lines until they become an interrogation of language, miming that "art has been declared a dwarf pursuit/ by the IAU's Working Group on the Definition of Pursuits." The reader is left to ponder the link between seemingly disparate disciplines, and the connectivity of the poem's cultural signifiers. It's a breakout moment in a book that's built on extended meditations that often defy categorization. Other highlights include "Security Camera" and "Note Found in a Copy of A Midsummer Night's Dream," the latter of which deftly melds the content of a note found in a schoolbook with the Shakespeare plot therein. Sol has firmly established himself as one of Canada's finest young poets.
