Aaron Tucker: Molecular Cathedral: The Poetry of John Lent, selected with an introduction by Jake Kennedy

Molecular Cathedral: The Poetry of John Lent, selected with an introduction by Jake Kennedy
Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2024

 

 

 

        There are always the specifics and the lyrics details in John Lent’s poems, and in Molecular Cathedrals, a work that spans Lent’s terrific life of poetry, the reader is asked to inhabit the author and the landscapes of Western Canada, the Okanagan Valley in great parts, in the most intimate, direct, and wondrous ways. In this, the poems move the reader around physically and mentally: the pronouns (you, we, I) shift, the reader is the observer and the writer, the hills brown and relight along the lakeshores with the seasons, the lines extend, long and prose-like, like a breath held long, lungs released at the break.

        This is a book that demands that the full collections be sought out. If there is one critique to make of the book is that there is not enough of the poems, a fact made clear by how Lent works in the long form: a reader can take them as individual poems, but those same works really come to life within the scope of the book-length projects they come from, where the conversations and ecosystems are given the space intended. Any of Lent’s works would be worth searching out in full, but Wood Lake Music and Frieze are favourites, a soft spot for Black Horses, Cobalt Suns (my first Lent book), and his later work, Cantilevered Songs, A Matins Flywheel, in full sequence are beautifully meditative, crystalline.

        It’s not to say that the book doesn’t work with the arc it gives; it very much does. Through the decades this book covers, the reader gets a quiet excess of life, life (lives) lived, clear-eyed optimism, and amazement. It is that wonder that lingers throughout, Plath’s angel flaring at the elbow, or at a birdhouse in “Carpenter”:

        …And there it is again, this mystery
        of joining, of intersections, corners, fits, so
        damn important in everything we do, each
        small jazz symphony we might
        construct, for example,
        or song we might want
        to sing in the middle
        of the night, or poem 

Or the morning kitchen, in “Light”:

        You turn a faucet, you
        feel the chrome handle
        while another part of you
        reaches for the coffee beans
        and all surfaces, outside and in,
        are illuminating this instance
        of pure glee, pure surface

This is what I exited the book with, against a world that glooms everyday, that the daily, with enough attention, can also hold dazzle and dignity and a beautiful moment, or string of moments in surprising combination. This collection is an intelligent delight, bookended kindly by Jake Kennedy’s introduction and Lent’s closing essay, worth the investment between the covers and the effort to find the excerpted books in their complete forms.  

 

 

 

 

Aaron Tucker is the author of two novels and three books of poetry, including his latest, the novel Soldiers, Hunters, Not Cowboys with Coach House Books (2023). He is currently an Assistant Professor in the English Department of Memorial University, where he teaches Media Studies and Creative Writing. More at: www.aarontucker.ca

Aaron Tucker : Amarillo by Morning (for ryan fitzpatrick

from Report from the fitzpatrick Society, Vol. 1 No. 1

 

 

For Ryan Fitzpatrick, strait from the heart

 

 

It’s #True! Last weekend was one for the books!

Get ready for a good time in Kansas City

Happy Valentine’s Day everyone! [heart emoji]

Celebrate #NationalGuitarDay

Tag who you’re spending #ValentinesDay with! #CrossMyHeart #PureCountry

This weekend! Who’s ready?

You can find us Beyond the Blue Neon today. Anyone up for a game of pool?

Three words: write this down

Ready to be back

Cowboy hat [checkmark emoji] Four wheeler [checkmark emoji] Dog [checkmark emoji]

Wide open spaces [checkmark emoji] Sounds like the ingredients for a perfect Texas day.

#ThrowbackThursday to roping in 2011

“There’s an old love in his heart, that he can’t lose / He’s try forgettin’, but he knows it’s no use.” #FoolHeartedMemory

A day in the studio [microphone emoji] 

“Well the truth about a mirror / is that a damn old mirror / don’t really tell the whole truth.” #Troubadour

What’s going on in your world?

She understood the assignment.

Have a blessed New Year, everyone!

When you hear those #ChristmasCookies going in the oven

“Anything can happen, so imagine it’ll never end.” #GiveItAllWeGotTonight

It’s time to celebrate our trusty steeds. Happy #NationalHorseDay!

Howdy.

 

 

 

 

Aaron Tucker is the author of two novels, three books of poetry and two film studies monographs. His latest novel, Soldiers, Hunters, Not Cowboys (Coach House Books) was named one of the best books of 2023 so far by The Toronto Star. His doctoral dissertation “The Flexible Face: Uniting the Protocols of Facial Recognition Technologies” (March 2023), and was nominated for the York University Dissertation Prize; his graduate work at York’s Cinema and Media Arts department won the Governor General's Gold Medal. In addition, he is currently a SSHRC postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto where he is recreating the history of AI in Canada as a technonational project. He grew up on the Sylix Territory in the Okanagan Valley in British Columbia, and currently lives and works in Tkaronto on the lands covered by the Dish With One Spoon Wampum Covenant.

Julia Polyck-O'Neill, Aaron Tucker, Claire Kelly, Su Croll + Christian McPherson : virtual reading series #10

a series of video recordings of contemporary poets reading from their work, prompted by the Covid-19 pandemic and subsequent cancellations, shut-downs and isolations; a reading series you can enjoy in the safety of your own protected space,

Julia Polyck-O’Neill : “Cell Atlas,” “poem for flesh,” “the theory of the maternal imagination (after Rosi Braidotti’s “Monsters, Mothers, and Machines”),” “the theory of (imagi)nation,” “poem for a new geography,” all from the suite Cell Atlas

Julia Polyck-O’Neill is an artist, curator, critic, and writer. She is completing a SSHRC-funded interdisciplinary and comparative doctoral dissertation at Brock University, examining connections between contemporary conceptualist literature and art in Vancouver. She was a 2017-18 visiting lecturer in Transnational American Studies at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany, and is a 2019-20 Fellow of the Electronic Literature Organization. She was recently awarded a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellowship to work in York University’s Sensorium Lab. Her critical writing has been published in Canadian Literature, English Studies in Canada, BC Studies, Tripwire, Prefix, and elsewhere, and she has published three poetry chapbooks with above/ground press.

Aaron Tucker : excerpt from Catalogue d'oiseaux

Aaron Tucker's most recent work is the novel Y (Coach House Books) which was recently translated into French as Oppenheimer (Éditions La Peuplade); he has a forthcoming poetry collection titled Catalogue d'oiseuax with Book*hug Press in the Spring of 2021. His prior books also include the poetry collections punchlines (Mansfield Press) and Irresponsible Mediums: The Chess Games of Marcel Duchamp (Book*hug Press) as well as the cinema studies texts Interfacing with the Internet in Popular Cinema and Virtual Weaponry (both with Palgrave Press). He is currently a VISTA and Elia scholar undertaking his PhD in the Cinema and Media Studies department at York University where he is studying the moving images of facial recognition software.

Claire Kelly : “As if you steeped and drank these streets" from Maunder (Palimpsest Press 2017),” “Her Pillow Smells of the Special” from One Thing – Then Another (ECW Press 2019)

Claire Kelly has written two full-length poetry collections, One Thing – Then Another (ECW Press 2019) and Maunder (Palimpsest Press 2017), and a chapbook forthcoming with Rahila’s Ghost Press, Another Final Girl. Her poetry has appeared in literary journals across Canada and has recently focused on horror films (but with feminism!) and the apocalyptic nothingness that is becoming the certain future of Earthlings (but with jokes!). She lives and writes on Treaty 6 territory in Edmonton.

Su Croll : “Head-on collision,” “Side track” and “Loco motion” from Cold Metal Stairs (Turnstone Press, 2019), a book commemorating her father’s dementia and  death.

Su Croll’s two previous books, Worlda Mirth and Blood Mother, have been awarded or nominated for The Kalamalka New Writers Competition, the Gerald Lampert Award, the Stephan G Stephansson Award, and the Canadian Author’s Association Poetry Award. A short selection of poems from Cold Metal Stairs was long-listed for the 2015 CBC Poetry Prize. “Side track” was short-listed for Arc’s 2018 Poem of the Year Award. Her novel, Seeing Martin, is slated for publication with Pedlar Press. Su Croll lives in Edmonton.

Christian McPherson : “One Poem” from One Poem (Now Or Never Publishing, 2017)

Christian McPherson is a poet and novelist. He lives in Ottawa with his wife and their two kids. He has written a bunch of books including The Cube People, Saving Her, and My Life in Pictures. If he isn’t out walking his dogs, driving his son to hockey practice or his daughter to cheerleading, he is usually sneaking off to the movies. Walking on the Beaches of Temporal Candy is his new book of poetry coming out this fall from At Bay Press.