Colin Browne’s new collection, The Hatch, extends his formal engagement with the margins of the new documentary. Myth, history, and the present are contemporaneous in these poems; nothing is ever one thing, and nothing is itself for very long.

Figuratively speaking each poem is caught in mid-air, as if delivered in the flash reflected off a twisting sheet of metal. There is a new music in these pages, improvisations on the demotic, the lyrical, and the scientific in what amounts to a season of journal entries and field notes. Included are observations of Anna Akhmatova, André Breton, Benjamin Britten, Emily Carr, Blaise Cendrars, Aimé Césaire, Marcel Duchamp, Sorley MacLean, Charles Olson, and others. Certain texts are rooted in the tradition of the garden as observatory. An 1808 sea-otter expedition from New Arkhangel (Sitka) to California founders on the coast of early 21st century conspiracy theories.

Browne’s poems have regularly addressed landscape and the intersections of personal and public history; in The Hatch there is a rhythmic and political urgency in which the exchange of forms is lightning quick. This is a book of transformations.

Clint Burnham is widely published as a critical theorist, poet, and author of books on digital culture. He is the author of book-length studies of Steve McCaffery and Fredric Jameson, a novel titled Smoke Show (2005), and several books of poetry, including The Benjamin Sonnets (2009). His most recent critical book is The Only Poetry that Matters: Reading the Kootenay School of Writing (2012). His most recent art writing includes a catalogue essay on Canadian photographer Kelly Wood; an essay on Edward Burtynsky is in the forthcoming Petrocultures collection from McGill-Queens. During a residency at the Urban Subjects Collective in Vienna in 2014–15, he wrote books on Slavoj Žižek and digital culture, and on Fredric Jameson and Wolf of Wall Street.Burnham is an associate member of the SFU Department of Geography and a member of SFU’s Centre for Global Political Economy. He is a founding member of the Vancouver Lacan Salon.

Colin Browne's profile page

“It is time that the film-maker/poet Colin Browne from BC got celebrated for the work he has done through four books now, all published by Talonbooks: Ground Water (2002), The Shovel (2007), The Properties (2012), and this latest one, The Hatch. … Browne’s eclectic and wide-ranging ear invites company, conversations … exhilarating. … This poet can apparently do anything … The diversity and dexterity are dazzling, the images stick, the phrasing causes slaps or shivers. … If you haven’t read Colin Browne, I urge you to.”
– The Bull Calf

"a composition “utilizing history, personal information, mythology, narrative fragments and collage, and a respect for and repeated homages towards forebears, whether personal or literary, as well as a deep awareness of their natural environment … there is as much heart as documentary here.”
– rob mclennan’s blog