Spending the year with new(ish) books by friends, locals, and other Canadian poets old and new. Follow along daily by subscribing to on the right.

This week’s micro-review is of yet another book I waited far too long to read. Palimpsest published “Lost Signal” pretty much a year ago. Through a series of missed opportunities, from me not making it to his launch to everyone getting to Chris and buying all his books (that’s how good it is!) before I could at his Poetry Festival in April, it took a while to get my hands on a copy. I finally found a copy at our local independent bookstore this summer.

Chris, I am sorry it took me so long to read this. My vain hope is that I can somehow convince a couple of more people who may have missed the excitement when it was released to go buy a copy now because it is fantastic! This means you dear reader, I am giving you your call to action before I’ve even started to talk about the actual poetry. Go, on, git! Hie thee hence to a bookstore! This little micro-review will be waiting when you get back.

So, to the poetry. As you read through these poems, the sense of missed connections, or almost connections, or imperfect connections, the knowing and not knowing each other and ourselves, flow through these poems. The exploration of these themes perhaps culminates near the end of the book in a poem from which the collection’s title, I believe, is taken: ‘Loneliness Is A Condition Institutionally Created and Instated to Control and Subdue the Populace.’ How is that for a title!

More than the top-line themes of connection though, I want to draw your attention to the water that flows through these poems. There is a river that “froths and foams” its way through the book. Sometimes it is on the surface “pure // unbraided muscle” the way “lightning lays down / its smooth green bones to sleep.” Sometimes you forget about it until Chris reminds us of “the sound of the river forever / clearing these small smooth stones from its throat.”

If I was writing more than a micro-review, or if I was back in university writing a paper, I would explore the water in this book. There is a lot going on here – a lot that is going to reward multiple reads – and perhaps this is the strongest recommendation one can give a book: you’re going to want to read it more than once.

So in addition to the poems I’ve highlighted this past week (and below) these lines from the second section of the book, which is a long-ish poetic mediation on his father’s death called ‘This is Not a Poem’ is what has been driving my creativity:

Now, I’m old enough
to say, this is not a poem
yet. Poems don’t exist
until we close the book
and walk (or fly)
away.