Stranger
Poems that reawaken the reader’s sense of wonder.
In Stranger, Nyla Matuk’s provocative, unabashedly sensual voice leads us to revelations about how our lives are increasingly disembodied by social media’s flattened, outward identity markers. In place of this contested sense of self, Stranger reckons with a range of possible states of unknowing. Have we over-determined our identities, and thus diminished our appetites? “I fell asleep between two cold rivers,” Matuk reports, “while the blue shadows of uncomplicated / conifers leaned into their own.” Bold and spontaneous, piling images and ideas on top of each other to create opulent sound patterns, these poems reawaken the reader’s sense of wonder.
Based On Actual Events
Taking its inspiration from Melville’s famous line “If man will strike, strike through the mask!”, Based on Actual Events punches through the surface of visible things, grabbing wild at the drifting actual. Calling himself a “a realist in fabulist clothing,” Robert Moore gives us a book-length sequence of sleek, fiercely comic, colloquial poems whose aphoristic storytelling is pegged to a nostalgia for sublimity. His project is to find new frames of reference for our estrangement from the world. With each burst of invention and stylistic high-spiritedness (“So we reverse engineered the awesome and all we got / was this lousy poesy”), Based on Actual Events adds up to be Moore’s best book yet.
Model Disciple
The strengths of the collection reside in movement, and Prior’s ability to generate one image and end up somewhere surprising. –Micheline Maylor, The Quill & Quire.
In many ways—the range of interests, quality of language, the attention to rhythm—Prior’s work is a kind of blend of P. K. Page and Karen Solie, but I make those comparisons only to say that his work is already polished and self-assured. –Jay Ruzesky, The Malahat Review.
Global Poetry Anthology 2015
Edited by Gabeba Baderoon, Kate Clanchy, Carolyn Forché, Amanda Jernigan, Anthony Lawrence, Niyi Osundare, Jennifer Rahim, K. Satchidanandan, Michael Schmidt, Bruce Taylor.
The Global Poetry Anthology 2015 is a one-of-a-kind collection of contemporary poems, previously unpublished, and gathered from all corners of the English-speaking world. The international editorial board ensures the present volume’s cosmopolitan palette and the blind selection process guarantees the selections have been made according to poetic caliber alonge.
Véhicule Press’s Signal Editions is proud to offer the third volume in the Global Poetry Anthology series—a rich and exciting mix of established and emerging voices.
