Cutting Room

Sarah Pinder

• Publisher: Coach House Books
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781552452646
• eBook ISBN: 9781770563247
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Canadian Poetry
• Index: Literature

Cutting Room both describes and pushes against the anxious hum of the technologically saturated present. Sarah Pinder's poems navigate domestic and "natural" spaces as landscapes charged with possible violence and desire while they scan scenes as an outsider or camera eye to unsettle and fray familiar settings. Using hyper-focus and the long gaze, they draw the eye to the corners and seams of these spaces, slowing us down, shifting our focus to worn detail, asking us to seek pattern and possibility in a hyper-paced present tense. These are little ominous films, documenting the minutiae around us that can be our undoing.

Let their ribs stretch out – there is no figure
which is not also a ground in

its arctic plane. Cutting rooms as luck
would have it have academic sincerity.

Sarah Pinder was born in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, and lives in Toronto, Ontario. This is her first collection.

before a wealth of windows

waiting to take off belt and watch

with the hope of few official questions,

scan bone-through, transparent

before you’re cradled in the air

over the twice-tossed glass

landscape, tearing a little

packet of salt, spilling it over

the tray table,

dusting your knees.

dear bird,

here in arms

is there enough

to just explode already?

the blue, clean line of land

precise, only crooked.

each night I dream the neighbourhood

as an obstacle course stopping me

from catching a train.

it is never this city,

and often my little legs seem almost mechanical.

I can be hours away from the station

with the final call flashing and I still try.

never really miss, never catch it,

just bolt up, clattering

awake.

when I was a girl, I had a postcard

from a married man,

a photograph of a mirror

that turned the room into a bowl,

brittle curtains raked into weedy filter.

the following effects:

one dubbed blues tape

on the mantle,

the joke of a logoed ball cap,

his thumb, an eclipse

in frame,

opening the eye

that recorded

while dodging his reflection out,

giving, grim –

he’d fled.

I will promise this short-shrift season

in video and voicemail from Toronto,

to ride past the chop shop, detailing

the concrete with wet wheels.

making a meal of single servings,

you lie in long grass and break melba toasts in honey against your palate,

a twist of rebar prodding your shoulder blade.

the scorched-out

scatters itself in dust, airbrushed through

thistles puffed into seed,

little worn-through heel of fire,

not melting, but streaking the glass shards it’s ringed with.

enough of the passport-sized photos,

backless, scanned on screen,

no dregs of ink smeared flathand

across the waxy paper,

enough of just scrolling,

never ceasing to scroll.

what was looking when there wasn’t

a date stamp that kept rolling in live feed?

even refresh was a tread in thickness, then,

clicking through to another slow-loading version of

another girl’s bedroom when it required anticipatory pause:

a sliced couch or quarter-window

blur of an eye, hairfall,

enough bra strap to give you the glimpse

of an other on the line.

I guess this is supposed to be exciting.

we are entering a story in the middle. it creeps up your pant legs

on your way to the video mart

where you will read boxes,

try to pick a tone that won’t leave you

envious or haloed.

in straight-to-video of the neighbourhood you once lived in,

crying and grey are motifs.

every fifteen minutes there is a slow pan to rooftops –

you laugh, then are covered in crumbs,

fleas bouncing off your ankles, shaking it all off.

the back acre hold...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Copyright
• Fuel
• Armoury
• The Rye House
• End Times
• Obsolete Objects in the Literary Imagination
• Split Walls
• Two Suites After Frances Bacon
• Archipelagos
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author
• Colphon