Paperback
64 pages
9780864926838
$19.95
Pub date: September 28, 2012
Rights: World
Patrick Warner’s Perfection—the follow-up to his award-winning Mole—makes a carnival of our most potent and dangerous obsessions. A factory outlet sells designer human parts at cut-rate prices, a midlife crisis becomes a cleansing ritual, a chocolate-chip pancake stands accused at trial,
and the predatory voice of anorexia speaks to a transfixed audience.
In descending the rabbit hole of this wildly imaginative collection, we find ourselves amid a field of engagement where destructive ideals of beauty, politics, art, romantic love, and spirituality are ambushed by roguish parody, acerbic satire, life-affirming laughter, and a hard-won
pragmatism.
And while Warner’s trademark playfulness and formal ingenuity remain intact, his classic arms-length objectivity gives ground to a private and autobiographical directness of style often evaded in his earlier work. In Perfection, where death is certain and certainty is hell-bent on death, Warner refuses to rest on his laurels, continuing to build on his reputation as one of the most respected voices in Canadian poetry.
Praise for Patrick Warner's poetry:
“Warner’s poems can be comical, tender, brutal...they are always enlightening in their implied connections, sublime in their musical inventiveness.” — Sunday Independent
“And there you have it: Warner’s gift for casting a spell with the sure-wristedness of an experienced fisherman.” — Ruth Roach Pierson, author of Aide-Mémoire and Contrary
“A complex poet, capable of seriousness and thought as well as whimsy and play.” — PN Review
Anorexia
The less there is of you the more of me.
The doctors refer to me as he.
He is not you, they say to her.
She takes a shaky breath. She runs around
and I run with her underground.
I play my hostess like a violin,
my minimalist concerto for torso and limbs.
That’s you in the loo, your woodwind guts,
the cymbal splash of watery vomit,
the kettle drum of bowels in the bowl.

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