An experiment in hybrid and versatility of voice, these texts stutter around the slipperiness of language and the transience of desire.The first section is an exercise in paradox wherein language as medium breaks free of signification and desire, knowing very well that language is inextricable from desire. The second section concedes that language may be inescapable yet its borders and meanings must and can be moveable, so that through the decomposition of what has been said or written the new may sustain itself on the dregs of the past. The third section is a burlesque reflection on the kaleidoscopic incarnations of Eros as it passes through assorted personalities and neuroses, that is, a chorus of anonymous men, all in various states of confusion about love. Each man is but a different face on the ten-thousand-sided-dice of the same drive wherein gender stereotypes are inflated to show their contours, exposing romantic desire as it is: essential, absurd, random, hideous, and blind.

Laura Broadbent is the author of Oh There You Are I Can’t See You Is It Raining? (Invisible), which won the 2012 Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry and In on the Great Joke (Coach House Books). Originally from Stratford, Ontario, she currently lives in Montreal where she is working on her PhD in Literature.

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• Winner, Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry

“There is something about the sharpness of Broadbent’s lines that really appeal.”—rob mclennan

“Broadbent’s writing does indeed come across as an experiment bent on breaking down proverbial gender stereotypes and giving new meaning to relationships.”— The Toronto Quarterly

rob mclennan