Garry Thomas (EDT),Gaston,Lise/ Morse

Cityscapes in Mating Season combines a lyric sensibility with a distrust of any such singular vision, a loneliness coupled with desire to feel into the thrumming ground of a place, and a willingness to register beauty even at its most apocalyptic. Whether playful, sensual, or unsettling, the poems in this collection are always tightly crafted, attuned to languages possibilities as well as its limitations, its pitch and roll. From protest-filled Montreal to Vancouver’s property disputes, the works in Cityscapes reach out to the textures of urban space, but also interrogate the human and industrial facets of supposed wilderness, from graffitied ruins in the Irish countryside to baited crab traps along BC’s Gulf Islands.