Visual Inspection
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Composed over a period of profound illness, Visual Inspection is a searching reflection on poetry, power and our embodied lives. Shaped by matching elements of literary history, poetic practice, contemporary art, politics and ecology with Rader’s own experience of chronic illness and pain, Visual Inspection writes into and through what is accessible to our minds and bodies. Part memoir, part essay, part poetic investigation, the text guides us through kaleidoscopic meditations on disability, access, vision, redaction, pain, illness and death. Set primarily in the central Okanagan, Visual Inspection is a codex of references, artifacts and associations that, taken as whole, revisions access as process and art as experience.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The fifth book from Canadian poet Raider (A Doctor Pedalled Her Bicycle over the River Arno) originates from an "eyes closed walking tour" that he took through a part of downtown Kelowna, British Columbia, near where he lives. The result is a series of associative meditations about nonvisual knowing, "To follow is to be guided... Walking, we map a space in time. What exists in that space." He posits that poetry can be as physical as it is visual, reading it, as much an act of the body as of the mind. The writer's voice is intelligent and engaging, offering many interesting observations on a range of topics encompassing Wallace Stevens and Robert Hass as well as Richard Florida's "creative cities" theory (copious footnotes are included). But what drives the narrative is the gradual unfolding of Raider's disability an immune disorder that results in debilitating pain and how friends and family create and inform his reality. Attempts to see the unseen (including First Nations people, whose lives and languages are still evident, though often ignored) blend with the attempt to understand oneself, given the knowledge that "touch is never innocent." This hybrid text, part lyric essay, part poem, offers a vision that poets will be drawn to.
