This profoundly engaged, boldly formed long suite poem probes the legacy of human intelligence put in service of ruin. The rhythm of Morse Code drives the poem’s haunting music as the poet records the effects of warcraft on places and times of perilous and bright possibility for human cohabitation. The result is a book of chimeric monologues in an invented form Lubrin calls the tesseract—a poem of 16 lines of fragmented music, shaped by the logic of the mathematical cube—four stanzas growing from the quatrain, each increased by one line until the final one-line stanza.
The poet here addresses the myth of the developed world’s heirs, casualties, and its wing of weapons that guarantee(d) the successes of empires. Bright Machine reckons with the saga of civilization as the story of arms history and its emissaries’ expansive appetites for recasting conquest and mass killing, in, all at once, heartening, urgent poetry for a turbulent world.
Author
Canisia Lubrin
CANISIA LUBRIN’s books include Voodoo Hypothesis and The Dyzgraphxst. Lubrin’s work has been recognized with the Griffin Poetry Prize, the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, the OCM Bocas Prize for Poetry, the Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry, the Writer’s Trust of Canada Rising Stars prize, and others. Also a finalist for the Trillium Book Award for Poetry and the Governor General’s Literary Award, Lubrin has held fellowships at the Banff Centre, Civitella Ranieri in Italy, Simon Fraser University, Literature Colloquium Berlin, Queen’s University, and Victoria College at the University of Toronto. She studied at York University and the University of Guelph, where she now coordinates the Creative Writing MFA in the School of English & Theatre Studies. In 2021, Lubrin received a Windham-Campbell Prize for poetry, and the Globe and Mail named her Poet of the Year. Code Noir: Metamorphoses is her debut fiction, and includes stories listed for the Journey Prize (2019, 2020), Toronto Book Award (2018) and the Shirley Jackson Award (2021). Born in St. Lucia, Lubrin now lives in Whitby, Ontario, and is the poetry editor at McClelland & Stewart.
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