Ian LeTourneau imagines history and memory as a glacial landscape that is both advancing and inert. The result is a collection where metaphor unfurls on a conveyor belt of precise language constructed to assemble the past we pretend not to remember, the future we try not to imagine and the present we cannot escape. Shifting tectonic plates of memory and history resist any cartographic finality: an ocean becomes a factory of ice and then something else again from the debris of the glacier; mechanical hard?backed beetles till and transform the landscape; and the last minute of childhood is both exposed and protected. Terminal Moraine announces the arrival of an urgent new voice in Canadian poetry, one that embraces our myriad jagged landscapes, both personal and public, thawing and freezing.

IAN LETOURNEAU’s poetry has appeared in The Fiddlehead, Arc, The Antigonish Review, Event, and The Malahat Review. His work has twice won CBC’s Alberta Anthology, in 2005 and 2006. Using many forms, his poetry unsentimentally documents our uneasy relationships with the natural world. A transplanted Maritimer, he now lives in Athabasca, Alberta.

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