Other People's Lives

Exciting music, delicious ironies, radiant self-awareness. With imagination, wit and scrupulous candour, Chris Hutchinson's poems negotiate and renegotiate the shifting no-man's-land between self and others, introspection and public life. Here are poems carrying unflinching perceptions on their own innovative, edgy music, refusing inflations of rhetoric and complacent notions of the inner life, bringing skeptical intelligence and radical imagination--those supposedly incompatible room-mates--into electrical connection. The result is a poetry of daring honesty, close observation, and humanity, executed with exhilarating verve and humour. "Each day's a notch on the oven dialthe sadistic hand of summer turns. The locals herewear mirrored glasses with the mirrors reversed!Was I ever filled with sweetness and courage?For miles and miles the asphalt unwinds, the river'sevil twin. So is desire your enemy's friend, goes the jazz of imagined footsteps slapping the city's impervious skin. So each daylapses, un-spools each night as I go schemingways to continue, safe within and darkly throughan immaterial sublime. But the walls are sweatingand the windows here peer in towards this shelteredcorner of the universe -- where I'm in trouble againwith words, and other people's lives."--from "Cross-Sections"