National Network for Equitable Library Service

Precision-built poems that attempt CPR on their own irregular meter, on their own unreliable meaning.Vancouver poet Shaun Robinson’s If You Discover a Fire is a debut collection of poems that make a virtue of their failure to communicate. They forage through the syntax and vocabulary of late-night voicemails, letters to the editor, songs invented in the shower, professional jargon, “Witness Wanted” signs, technical manuals, and text-message typos to assemble verbal collages that raise more questions than they answer. In settings ranging from Montreal's Mile End to a commercial flight above the Midwest to a wildfire in the mountains of British Columbia, these are poems rooted in working-class Canadian experience, poems that flirt with both safety and danger, that drone on like drunken strangers in a bar. Gathering reference from weather reports, football announcers, aerial disappearances, and the movie Groundhog Day, these poems sound their forlorn yawp through the alleys of East Vancouver. Out on the porch, between shots, he tells you / things you've always known, how the past / and the future are lovers spooning / in bed, and the present is how they don't / quite fit together. (from "Carpe Dos and Carpe Don'ts (FT. Panda Bear)").