With Here, award-winning poet Colin Browne offers a book of luminous encounters, contradictions, collisions, and meditations on art, nature, justice, historical memory, and territorial occupation. Browne's texts mine the harrowing destinies and densities of place - in this case, of the North American Northwest Coast. The work's seven movements are tuned to the autobiographical, alert to rhythm and improvisation, and immersed in an ambience of memory and tenderness. Here is a book for the ear, its compositional model borrowed from jazz improvisation; by locating a rhythm or a melodic line, and opening the field to associations, visions, rhymes, chance, interruption, and grace, the texts summon and assemble themselves. "Art does not render the visible, but renders visible," said Paul Klee. Why are we aching so? Where are the words and melodies that will heal us?
Here is also a book of voices, infused with the eros of intertextuality: Apollinaire, whose spirit presides over these pages, along with Antonin Artaud, André Breton, Robert Burton, Louis Clexlixqen, Henry Edenshaw, Frantz Fanon, Sa7plek (Chief Joe Capilano), Gwendolyn MacEwen, Charles Olson, Pablo Picasso, Dorothy Jean Ray, Raymond Roussel, Gertrude Stein, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman. Included are Browne's translations of early modernist poems by Apollinaire and Cendrars citing Vancouver, which in the early decades of the twentieth century captured the imagination of Parisian artists and poets.
Here is a book of luminous encounters, contradictions, collisions, interruptions, and meditations on art, nature, justice, historical memory, and territorial occupation. Browne's texts, in seven movements, mine the harrowing destinies, and densities, of place, in this case, of the Northwest Coast of North America.
"There is no "here" without an understanding of how we got here and Browne takes the gull's eye view of history ceding, receding, proceeding as he defines optimism step by step, calling on his examination of the past to imagine the future."
-Linda Rogers, the Ormsby Review
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