In Realia, Michael Trussler grapples with the black fire of mental illness, revels in the joy inherent to colours, and probes what it means to be alive at the beginning of the Anthropocene. Perfectly clear, perfectly opaque, Trussler’s poetry implodes the lyric to channel the bright disintegration of our contemporary moment. These are poems requiring Jonah and Little Red Riding Hood to change places if we are to measure diagnostically homeless oceans, surveillance capitalism, and the vulnerable human body. Shambolic and precise, these poems are unskinned. Including a mini-essay on the author’s OCD and another on how a Caspar David Friedrich painting is an uncanny neighbour to ourselves, Realia is fluent in mitochondrial psychology and the diaries of Katherine Mansfield. It also offers lessons in extinct Barbie Doll arrangement.

Michael Trussler’s work engages with the beauty and violence of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries from a neuro-divergent, fluid perspective. His writing encompasses several genres and modes of expression, ranging from the lyrical to the avant-garde. (An avid photographer, he sometimes blends Polaroid photography with text.) He is the author of ten books, including The History Forest, winner of the Saskatchewan Book Award for Poetry; the short fiction collection Encounters, winner of the Saskatchewan Book of the Year Award; and a memoir entitled The Sunday Book, which won the Saskatchewan Book Award in both the Non-Fiction and City of Regina categories. Deeply compelled by the natural world, Trussler hikes in the Canadian Rockies at every opportunity. He teaches English at the University of Regina. 10:10 is Michael Trussler’s seventh book of poetry.

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Ping-ponging back and forth between interpretive prose and a poetic voice that is helpful, informative and shaken, Michael Trussler takes in the rubble of now. His book is a Lyrical Ballads manifesto for the anti-sublime (machines that learn, Gaboxadol hallucinations). Every thing is not a thing but “vibrant matter” and not particularly kind but more or less loyal to “juddering” humans, or so we like to think. The frightening are everywhere. And then the reader comes upon the extraordinary poetic essay for Katherine Mansfield. Realia is fierce and tender.,
- Tim Lilburn, author of Numinous Seditions: Interiority and Climate Change