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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. ‘Cusp”s central sequence, however, concerns the tragic life and death of Frank Bonneville, a schizophrenic and drug-addicted artist who became Ms. Owen’s muse between their 2001 meeting and his 2003 suicide. Complemented by Karen Moe’s haunting photographs of Vancouver’s neglected spaces and rejected objects, ‘Cusp/detritus’ is a testimony to an obsession with the lost.

“It is intentionally unsettling, disturbing, sad, and you cannot deny it, a celebration of a life.” – Prairie Fire

Cut Side Down is a textual collage, or a book feasting on books. The title is a metaphor for the sensuous paper cut received when diving face first into the bookcase, and it means to call up the pleasure and pain of contact with so many literary personalities. The poems are collapsing under the weight of influence and the result is a sumptuous, body-and-mind bending landscape. The book is written in three parts, but those parts refuse to remain discrete. In poems that blur the line behind autobiographical lyric and conceptual experiment, Virginia Woolf, Orlando, and their many husbands and wives attend the experimental salons hosted by Clark Coolidge and Renee Gladman. Lorine Niedecker is in the interactive classroom, scolding Charles Olson. The poet is sometimes perceptible too, as a lost boy in rural Prince Edward Island, as a young woman in Montréal la retentissante, as an inventor of worlds and words. Ultimately, through being immersed in the reading life of the poet and spying through the keyholes of fantasy, Cut Side Down is a false autobiographical engagement with desire and memory.

Up-and-coming poet Jamie Sharpe presents a finely tuned second collection

Cut-up Apologetic, Sharpe’s second collection, explores aging in a world where youth is terrible and something we desperately want back. These are poems about failing to leave our mark while marks are left on us — about the collective insatiability of emptying surroundings in an attempt to fill ourselves.

At the same time, Cut-up Apologetic is naïve and playful even when examining fear expressed as discrimination or the ways restlessness transitions into an inertia spelling cultural death. Sharpe finds strange new horizons “extend(ing)/only backward, into memory.”

To play “cutting the devil’s throat,” hold a round stone as if you were going to skip it across the water, but throw it straight up into the air. If you do it right, the stone drops into the water without a splash, making only a sound like a gulp. The poems in Cutting the Devil’s Throat create the persona of a young man cutting through darkness to light, finding a way to live a sane, useful life through modest yet deliberate daily action. In ghazal suites, short lyrics, and longer narrative poems, Steeves uses clean, precise language to open loopholes of vision in what is, for a young husband and father, a confusing, even threatening world.