BC Poetry 2018: "Safety Sand" by Garry Thomas Morse (Talonbooks)

To a Passerby*

A nauseating street was hurling
noise when a woman passed by
in the manner of a racy banner
censor to her own provocation

in each shiver of a statuesque
meme that made one eye roll
redden, rove, twitch, and
bulge with sweet torment

then she accidentally flashed
warped proportions with the
calibre of online distortions

prompting diurnal emissions
that were soon swallowed up
by that street of muffled love





*Transmutation of “À une passante” by Charles Baudelaire.

Who?

Garry Thomas Morse’s poetry books with LINEBooks include sonic riffs on Rainer Maria Rilke’s sonnets in Transversals for Orpheus and a tribute to David McFadden’s poetic prose in Streams. His poetry books with Talonbooks include a homage to San Francisco Renaissance poet Jack Spicer in After Jack, and an exploration of his mother’s Kwakwaka’wakw First Nations ancestry in Discovery Passages (finalist for the Governor General’s Award for Poetry and the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, also voted One of the Top Ten Poetry Collections of 2011 by the Globe and Mail and One of the Best Ten Aboriginal Books from the past decade by CBC’s 8th Fire), and Prairie Harbour and Safety Sand.


What?

In this companion to Governor General’s Award finalists Discovery Passages and Prairie Harbour, Garry Thomas Morse resumes his expansionist mapping of lyrical consciousness onto geographical concerns, acknowledging the unsettled edges of an imaginary territory. In Safety Sand, the reader is invited to step through a multilayered literary filter of uncanny allusions and cavalier translations to explore a nomadic Manitoba of the mind. Prairie surrealism is born!


When?

Arrived January 2018.


Where?

Purchase from the Talonbooks website or at your local bookstore. $18.95.


How?

Birthing prairie surrealism!

Talonbooks * About This Series * More Books, Please!

The copyrights of all poems included in the series remain with their authors, and are reprinted with the permission of the publishers.