If We Had A Can Lit That Worked by Ken Norris notesandqueries.ca - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from notesandqueries.ca Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Looking Sideways and Back canlit.ca - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from canlit.ca Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Trolling Twitter, I find a quote from poet Kay Ryan on Jason Guriel’s feed: “When I started writing nobody rhymed – it was in utter disrepute. Yet rhyme was a siren to me.”
Forgotten Work, Guriel’s new novel in verse, succumbs to this siren call with its heroic couplets acting as the engine for a futuristic tale of post-apocalyptic Montreal and the characters who dwell there – their new technologies and fan-boy pedantic obsessions with obscure details and music. The novel is a whirlwind of characters, mysteries, and happenings capable of blurring cohesiveness into a set of succulent fragments, each laden with suspense and development. This is no novel for fans of 20th-century CanLit’s plodding linear plots of settling the land and alcoholism. This one is for the boundary pushers and bohos, jazz snobs with their fanatical attention to minutiae that allows them to feel superior to those who do not know about what Bukowski calls “the thing!”