95 Books In 2006, George W. Bush read 95 books. We will do better.

This book is indeed a poetic essay; an extended poem on memory & forgetting. Buckley and I (and others on this blog) were in the same manuscript writing class in 2001-2 at University of Calgary; The Laundromat Essay contains some of the poems and ideas he was working on all those years ago, but this sequence is tighter, more focused and better structured, concerned as it is with archite(c)xture as a thematic and a formal constraint. 

“the poem is in the moment that names and bodies fail.”

The book is centred in the city (my favourite obsession!) in an apartment in some state of renovation or collapse, against a suburban or wild childhood with relatives, forests, ravines and wolves, as well as the slightly sinister Mr. Wolf.

The seamless transitions from 1st to 3rd person and back suggest a subjectivity under erasure and a subjectivity trapped within a state of becoming. 

The through-thread love story is actually original. I realize this may have been stated before, but this is for reals. There is a love story. It is original. Read this book.

-Nikki