Desecrations

(Paperback)

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A luminous new collection of poems about entering middle age, living a life of books, and trying to know what it means to be or not be from or of a place. If pattern is information, and verse the mind's conversation with Time, Matt Rader's Desecrations animates a theatre of silence we recognize as mystery. Building on an already astonishing body of work, in lines so fluid and uncannily resonant they feel cousined to the dream world, Rader insists that intimate moments bear the cargo of both past and future, antiquity and grim projection, ancestry and unborn selves, resulting in poems of kaleidoscopic beauty and strangeness. These singular, musical evocations eschew argument in favour of a welcoming, arms-wide abandon, and an ethics of porousness and connection. By some alchemy of voice, detail, collision, and disobedience to chronology, Desecrations reveals the imagination as a worthy location of real experience. These poems are a new way to orbit around a locus of damage, a new fabric of signs and singing that we can't help but realize we'd been yearning for all along.

Reviews

"There is an ease and immediacy to Rader's writing that feels as intellectually discerning as it is strangely serendipitous . . . Rader never holds back in substance and is most admirable for bravely risking moments of personal terrain." Winnipeg Free Press
"Rader has the ability to see strange things, the quirky unseen details that might be difficult to mention. . . . He documents that continuing sensual edge between the bright light and the burn." The Georgia Straight
"Very impressive. . . . Rader has craft to burn and a compelling dark vision of life." Quill & Quire

Author Bio

MATT RADER is the author of three previous collections of poetry and a book of stories, What I Want to Tell Goes Like This. His work has appeared in journals and magazines across North America, Europe, and Australia. He teaches Creative Writing in the Department of Creative Studies at the University of British Columbia Okanagan.