Finalist for the George Ryga Award for Social Awareness

Rooted in the back alleys, squats and psychiatric wards of contemporary Vancouver and Montreal, these unyielding poems enter the intersecting tensions and intensities in characters such as Mike, a panhandler on Vancouver's Commercial Drive, Matthew, a runaway punk, and Dara, a single mother. Cusp's central sequence, however, concerns the tragic life and death of Frank Bonneville, a schizophrenic and drug-addicted artist who became Ms. Owen's muse between their 2001 meeting and his 2003 suicide. Complemented by Karen Moe's haunting photographs of Vancouver's neglected spaces and rejected objects, Cusp/detritus is a testimony to an obsession with the lost.

Praise for Cusp/Detritus:

"Catherine Owen is a shapeshifter of words, a mystic always at the edge of a precipice looking down into the absolute darkness. In reading this book, I who am by nature an escape artist in my own poetry, found myself drawn into the terrifying nucleus of this epic. Vancouver photographer Karen Moe adds further resonance to this pithy volume with her stark images, featuring found objects. They weld together hauntingly with Owen's vision of alienation and the disembodiment of the marginalized of the inner city. Trust me: I recommend this volume of poetry for those readers who feel that they still have a spiritual envelope called a soul. Read this masterpiece, weep, and be restored." (Jose Rosenblatt, author of The Voluptuous Gardener and recipient of the Governor General's Award for Poetry)

"It is intentionally unsettling, disturbing, sad, and yet, you cannot deny it, a celebration of a life." (Prairie Fire)

"... disturbing and brilliantly observed." (Winnipeg Free Press)

Catherine Owen lives in New Westminster, BC. She is the author of ten collections of poetry, among them Designated Mourner (ECW, 2014), Trobairitz (Anvil Press 2012), Seeing Lessons (Wolsak & Wynn 2010) and Frenzy (Anvil Press 2009). Her poems are included in several recent anthologies such as Forcefield: 77 Women Poets of BC (Mothertongue Press, 2013) and This Place a Stranger: Canadian Women Travelling Alone (Caitlin Press, 2014). Stories have appeared in Urban Graffiti, Memwear Magazine, Lit N Image (US) and Toronto Quarterly. Her collection of memoirs and essays is called Catalysts: Confrontations with the Muse (W & W, 2012). Frenzy won the Alberta Book Prize and other collections have been nominated for the BC Book Prize, ReLit, the CBC Prize, and the George Ryga Award. In 2015, Wolsak & Wynn published her compendium on the practices of writing called The Other 23 and a Half Hours or Everything You Wanted to Know That Your MFA Didn’t Teach You. She works in TV, plays metal bass and blogs at Marrow Reviews.

Catherine Owen's profile page

Karen Moe is a Vancouver photographer and multi-media performance artist. Her shows include perros y leones de centro habana at the Havana Gallery in Vancouver (2002) and Pteros Gallery in Toronto (2005), and Lethe: a mock-metaphysics at Xchanges Gallery in Victoria (2005). Moe's work also graces books and album covers, as well as such journals as Dandelion and West Coast Line. The detritus pieces were exhibited at Exposure Gallery in Vancouver in Spring 2005.

Karen Moe's profile page