Toronto poet Andy Weaver’s third poetry collection is interested in how language can and cannot grapple with the problem of how we experience and relate to the present moment, and how language both explains the problem but also provides a false sense of comprehension. Through experimental poetry, challenging texts, and philosophical matters, this is interested in the politics of aesthetics and in aesthetics as politics, and attempts to tackle the problems and ethics of putting extra-linguistic elements into language. As Weaver writes: “Language is, at its heart, this-ness, something too immediate to ever be understandable.

Andy Weaver was born in Saint John, New Brunswick, and grew up there, Ottawa, Ontario, and in small towns outside of Edmonton, Alberta. During his MA, he served on the poetry editorial board ofThe Fiddlehead, and was cofounder and poetry editor of Qwerty magazine. Weavers poetry has been published in numerous magazines and anthologies. Now completing his PhD at the University of Alberta, Weaver teaches first year English and is the cofounder of The Olive Reading and Zine Series.

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“In his accomplished third collection, Andy Weaver attempts to poeticize the unpresentable. Looking for poetry that pushes the limits of the lexicon, but never loses sight of the ludic? this is it.”—Stephen Cain

“Andy Weaver creates art amidst the artifice of attempts to linguistically and conceptually capture the “now.” Through an innovative spectral poetics, he shapes the shards of this contested cultural space of competing appetites and polarized political prisms that defines so much of the this-ness of contemporary capitalism. In this, this anarchic collage of diffracted histories and alphabetic matrices, he finds the Kantian sublime in the muscles of the human forearm, he finds Pliny the Elder telling his fanboy stories of the Phoenicians, he discovers that “The whole point of Batman is to take our attention away from all the Bruce Waynes of the world.” This is hilarious, chilling, and highly resourceful poetry always on the move after its elusive target. Nobody breaks things and puts them back together like Andy Weaver. Read this.”—Adam Dickinson

Stephen Cain