This first collection by Dale Tracy is the atmosphere that derelict bicycles breathe. Like weeds, ones we've built, they burgeon. These poems wonder what sort of a performance thinking is-they perform their own logical hysteria, that emotion that feels what the other emotions feel like. Unconventional but interested in convention, they turn the world in on itself until "[i]t's almost like a curtain / has been pulled and it's a different world. / A curtain has been pulled, but I can't see the curtain." Dale Tracy mines the intersection of the surreal and the philosophical, with a sprinkling of Samuel Beckett and a dash of Hélène Cixous. Tracy is a fresh, original voice in Canadian poetry, locking her startling surprises and beautiful enigmas in quiet but emphatic lines. Each poem in Derelict Bicycles takes things too far, to the edges of its own form

Dale Tracy is assistant adjunct professor in the Department of English at the Royal Military College of Canada.

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