Half wisecracking tour guide and half flirtatious trick, the poems in Shut Up Slow Down Let Go Breatheexamine how we respond to overwork and overstimulation. McCann’s third collection speaks to a world that is too busy and too anxious, delivering the material with zero reverence and with loads of self-deprecating, disarming, observational - and sometimes catty - humour. Inviting readers to be his “bandmates / on life’s slutty bus tour,” Shut Up Slow Down LetGo Breathe marks a fresh new direction in Marcus McCann’s poetics.

Marcus McCann is the author of Soft Where and eight chapbooks, most recently The Glass Jaw and Town in a Long Day of Leaving. His work has been shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award and the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry. In 2009, McCann was the winner of the John Newlove Award. He lives in Toronto.

“Not a syllable is wasted; rather than teach an austerity of pleasure, it encourages luxuriating and loitering in the back alleys of his poems. ” – Daniel Allen Cox  on  The Hard Return

“The poems that make up  Shut Up Slow Down Let Go Breathe  are, one might say, an incredible mouthful: smart and sassy, thoughtful and wise, thick with swagger, impulse and a great deal more experience than his prior two collections. ” —   rob mclennan

“Shut Up Slow Down Let Go Breathe  offers wry commentary on the modern world’s miniature nightmares. ” —   Winnipeg Free Press

“Marcus’ poetry collects the anxieties built from a combination of interactions within the city, between people, and with oneself. We are asked to slow our pace a heartbeat and observe those interactions. Document the anxieties. Laugh at them a little. Marcus guides us through a Toronto where the calm exists within the chaos, and we are only a car wreck away from finding it. ” —   Broken Pencil

“McCann’s work is a must for any lover of poems. ” —   Northumberland Today