“The Monument Cycles examines the ways ongoing forms of loss are variously memorialized, materialized, and situated as monuments. … These poems collectively straddle the disparate geographical and historical ties underlying monuments and spaces … It is, however, always the monument around which this collection’s daunting breadth continually coheres, not into a cacophonous or sanctimonious frenzy, but rather in the pulsing echoes of a poetry aware of time and place, intent on making memory as well as memorializing …”
– Canadian Literature

“Mariner Janes’s Monument Cycles makes its mark in a growing tradition of contemporary urban poetry notable for its polyvocality and elegiac exploration of the very human crises of late capitalism. This is a poetry both simple and smart, direct and oblique, urgent and carefully pausing over the details of everyday life though which we peer into “the burning world.” The poem is a fleeting monument to be sure – but perhaps no better, or more appropriate, monument is possible to the fragile lives Janes so carefully memorializes as he builds his “ark” of words from the “bones” he finds lying around.”
– Stephen Collis, author of the Dorothy Livesay award winning On the Material, and Dispatches from the Occupation

“A new urban vernacular poetry is emerging in Vancouver – tied to the rhythms of the city and the contradictions of the urban. Mariner Jane’s The Monument Cycles talks to the entanglements of all of the spaces and moments that make up a city, and it talks to (and through) other poets who set foot into the unpredictability of the street.”
– Jeff Derksen, author of Dwell and Down Time