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Slagflowers is the story of a fourth generation son of miners and his journey beyond the world underground. It’s the story on a city struggling to grow beyond its past and become more than just a mining city. It’s the story of everyone’s struggle to be more than their family history, more than their past. It’s the story of breaking through the earth and into the light.

Sharp, accessible and witty, Slant offers a fresh exploration of issues of race, sexuality, and life in the global village. The collection alternates between three main themes of childhood and family in the Chinese diaspora; gay sexuality, community and rites-of-passage; and voyages literal and metaphorical. Slant asks “how do we belong?” and answers in a voice that is compelling and unique.

“There hasn’t been a debut like this since Margaret Atwood’s The Journals of Susannah Moodie.” (Arc Poetry)

Powered by lush imagery and lyricism, the poems in The Sleep of Four Cities use the city as a metaphor for the complexity of self. This book invites the reader to take a journey through multiple cities – cities of memory, of desire, of imagination, of discovery, of loss – with only the map of language as a guide. The cities in this book are not always easily unlocked – they are at once tangible and invisible; they exist both inside and outside the speakers of the poems. Throughout the book, these speakers seek to discover what is within their grasp and what, like water, will slip through their fingers.

Praise for The Sleep of Four Cities:

“Jen Currin’s The Sleep of Four Cities comes into Canadian poetry with the same electric intimacy as Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon brought to the drawing rooms of Europe a century ago, and with a similar omnipresent dimensionality burning on the shore between touch and cognition. Currin’s poems are reminiscent of Don Domanski’s or John Ashberry’s, except that with Currin’s every link between every seemingly random image is precisely contained by a rigorous set of story-telling rules. Think Marilyn Bowering’s Autobiography meets Erin Mouré in a gallery of brilliantly coloured painterly surfaces with their roots in wisdom literature and folk-tale magic, and you have a hint of it. With this volume, an entire tradition, with its roots in Latin American and Eastern European poetry, all shaped with the rigour of the New York School in which Currin trained, has the potential to inspire and define a generation. There hasn’t been a debut like this since Margaret Atwood’s The Journals of Susannah Moodie… ” (Arc Poetry)

“In The Sleep of Four Cities, you can let Currin’s language take you down alleys, over bridges and through gates, without a destination, and you are overtaken by surprise and variety.” (BC BookWorld)

“‘My mask hangs by a threat,’ writes Jen Currin, and indeed an air of menace suffuses these brilliantly erotic and dangerous poems. Currin is a startling new talent who bears watching.” (John Ashbery)

BC Poetry in Transit selection (poem displayed on Vancouver city buses)

Poems from The Sleep of Four Cities selected as Poems of the Day on US websites Verse Daily and Poetry Daily

In her debut collection, Slide, Barbara Myers plays with the eternal present, the nunc stans, taking us through time and space, over three continents, where people, places and events continue to co-exist in memory and in the body. “Instructions for the Era of Water” is the opening poem in a series focusing on the mysteries of change, evanescence and renewal. Here, where “the sea has taken its place leaning against the wall,” Myers contemplates “floating settlements” and “amphibious houses.” In another poem, a family takes summer swims while soldiers train across the river in Petawawa for duty in Afghanistan. Other poems explore science, cats and paradox–even the curse of corn on genetic modifiers. By turns playful and sober, the poems in these pages, which represent and distill ten years’ work, spring from experiences in Ottawa–its storied Lowertown where the author now lives–and Halifax, where part of her remains, while also taking in the communities in between, and the Ocean Limited, which crosses salt marshes back and forth into the peninsula of Nova Scotia. Whether in form, near-form, or free form, here are poems with an ear to sound and the music of language, accessible and seamlessly crafted.