Dwell

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A long poem that blends and bends the lyric, procedural poetry, the travelogue and extended forms, Dwell lives in, or dwells on, the interaction of a restless subjectivity with the seemingly transparent, yet identifiable, social codes that encase us.

AUTHOR

Jeff Derksen

Jeff Derksen is a founding member of Vancouver’s writer-run centre, the Kootenay School of Writing, and worked as an editor of Writing magazine. His work has been anthologized in East of Main and Verse: Postmodern Poetry and Language Writing. As an editor, Derksen also organized “Disgust and Overdetermination: a poetics issue,” for Open Letter and “Poetry and the Long Neoliberal Moment” for West Coast Line. Derksen’s poetry and critical writing on art, urbanism and text have been published in Europe and North America. Formerly a research fellow at the Center for Place, Culture and Politics at the City University of New York, he currently works in the English Department at Simon Fraser University. He collaborates on visual art and research projects (focusing on urban issues) with the research collective Urban Subjects. Derksen’s Down Time won the 1991 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Award at the BC Book Prizes. A selection from Dwell — “Host Nation, Host Society”—was nominated for inclusion in The Gertrude Stein Anthology of Innovative North American Poetry: 1993.

Reviews

“As Jeff Derksen approaches family and personal life, at home and abroad, his work comes down to earth, becomes more serious, more analytical, optimistic, precise, and fragile. The word tour economic; a life’s work, critique, focus, attending to, listening a living, an expression of insolitude among domestic monuments and affairs of state.” – Melanie Neilson

“Dwell provides just the right kind of fin de siècle topo map required to reconnoiter our present bearings. Derksen’s accurate delineation of narrative edge coloured by layers of diction’s own superfluousness is a rare and honest measure of a world that’s signed out. In language that’s resolute in its probe for meaningful coordinates, these poems ‘fulfill’ their own codes, absorb ‘all (our) private space.’ We’ll never get home without them.” – Fred Wah

“[A] canny text, astute and sharp. This a brilliant mind at work, dwelling in, dwelling on.”
– Books in Canada

“Dwell is a compassionate and humane book, the product (nice package) of a personality engaged in analysis of meaning-making. And I feel I’ve been reading the presence of a life in its pages … a breathing friction. It’s like listening to music in its privileging of experience over knowledge.” – Prairie Fire

“Dwell … offer[s] an unsimplified and penetrating look at our time and place, where meaning and significance alter and blend. Derksen invites his readers to take part in this process.” – Vox