Description
Ten-Headed Alien draws from sci-fi and poli-sci, prog rock and politics, climate fiction and ancient mythology to create poems that are at once global and personal. The opening sections of the book take the reader on a harrowing sea-to-sky epic, from a drunken plane crash in the BC interior to the quiet beaches of Crete. Mythological creatures battle for the attention of an inverted mermaid, bionic pigeons flee their creators, barflies conjure soulmates, balloon farms exist on the moon and pigs, of course, fly. From Lake Nipissing to the moons of Jupiter, these poems travel around the world (and off it) united by the language of human fragility, and a sense of the body as engineered, temporary and exquisitely sad.
The book's final section brings an uncanny ten-headed alien to Earth and the apocalypse that unfolds is complex and devastating. Ten-Headed Alien, broad in scope, revels in strange, protean imagery to explore the swamps between our natural and technological worlds.
About the author
David James Brock is a playwright, poet, and librettist whose work has been performed in cities across Canada, the US, and the UK. He is a past winner of the Herman Voaden Canadian National Playwriting Award for his play Wet. Brock is the author of two poetry collections, Everyone is CO2 and Ten-Headed Alien (Wolsak & Wynn). For Scottish Opera, Brock co-created Breath Cycle, a multimedia operatic song cycle developed with cystic fibrosis patients, which was nominated for a Royal Philharmonic Society Award. With Mike Haliechuk, he co-wrote the opera Year of the Horse. He lives in Toronto.
