4/12/2017

BC Poetry 2017: "Night & Ox" by Jordan Scott (Coach House Books)


Excerpt from "Night & Ox"

I
worry
about this
rosepink
compression
of love-dread
reads me
infrasound
coyote tolling
upstairs
jammies
nightie
burrowing
pupshins
backlit
ankylosaurus
21
you're small
your small
so cry's
inky stampede
blotchy
in bee
costume
in
glyph kitchen
on
glottis island
studded
sturgeon
weighs
dashberry
mirror drum
decimal
cosmoglottal
mudstone, look
borealis
it’s crystalline
starboard boyform
metadata tone
boxlip
salmonoid
heaviness
always
magnetic
dignity
unlicked
cub


Who?

Jordan Scott is the author of Silt (2005), blert (2008) and, with Stephen Collis, Decomp (2013). Scott was the 2015/16 Writer-in-Residence at Simon Fraser University. He lives in Port Coquitlam, BC.


What?

Night & Ox is a long poem working its interruptions to a degree where it's broken by the will to live. A poem that invokes expansive loneliness, where the poet's emotional response is to endure. A crushed line of astral forms and anatomy in perpetual remove; it is a poem that nurtures vulnerability: some soft-footed embryo sounds against language’s viscera. Night & Ox possesses a feral minimalism for those too tired and too frantic with joy to cope with narrative.

"Scott takes us down to the basement of words, where sound and rhythm rule, and poets learn their craft." – Dennis Lee


When?

Arrives April 2017.


Where?

Book Launches: Done and gone.

Purchases: From the Coach House Books website or at your local bookstore. $18.95.

How?

Soft-footing embryo sounds against language’s viscera.



The copyrights of all poems included in the series remain with their authors, and are reprinted with the permission of the publishers.

No comments: