Gatecrasher

Susan Buis

• Publisher: Invisible Books
• Year: 2019
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781988784328
• Subtopic: Canadian Poetry
• Index: Literature

Poems that revisit and revise concepts of self and land.

The poems in Gatecrasher reimagine social and familial relationships, personal and collective failures, and false nostalgias. Part surreal autobiography, and part observation of how physical and conceptual human-made structures are collapsing, this wildfire debut dreamwalks through the liminal space between expectation and disappointment, and the poet's relationship to the BC landscape.

"We are in the presence of a formidably original poetic talent... This is an impressively mature first book."—The Ormsby Review

Invisible Publishing

Halifax & Picton

Text copyright © Susan Buis, 2019

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form, by any method, without the prior written consent of the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may use brief excerpts in a review, or, in the case of photocopying in Canada, a licence from Access Copyright.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: Gatecrasher / Susan Buis.

Names: Buis, Susan, 1955- author.

Description: Poems

Identifiers:

Canadiana (print) 20190085487 | Canadiana (ebook) 20190085495

ISBN 9781988784267 (softcover) | ISBN 9781988784328 (HTML)

Classification: LCC PS8603.U528 G38 2019 | DDC C811/.6—dc23

Edited by Leigh Nash

Cover design by Megan Fildes

Invisible Publishing | Halifax & Picton

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.

I acknowledge that I am a settler, visitor on unceded territories of the Nlaka'pamux and Secwépemc First Nations and am grateful to live within their traditional lands that inspire my writing.

To my family, with love.

SHELTER

Pero yo ya no soy yo,

Ni mi casa es ya mi casa.

But I am no longer I,

Nor is my house now my house.

— Federico García Lorca

Arrowslit

Quarry the stuff of a curtain wall, quarry the crenellation.

And when a skirmish weathers, I’ll lob projectiles—

rakes and broomsticks over firebreak stubble

like dragonflies buzzing ponds they left as nymphs.

Ghastly aqua larvae. An arrowslit’s devoid of pane,

wide enough for side-eye, too narrow for full frontal,

a tenant in chamber backlit with petrochemical yellow—

archrival without rival.

More than neural zone, the gap is open to artillery

and eye both besieged and beseeching. I love the vertical

strip of it—miles and miles of kind of blue,

blue haze, blue train and all blues, ...

Table of contents

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