Mature poems with their finger on the pulse of the dark side of the present.

Reading Edge Effects, Jan Conn's masterful eighth collection, is a little like looking at Edward Burtynsky's photographs of real industrial wastelands; both visions are as gorgeous as they are terrifying, platforms for thought, even for activism, depending as they do on the energy of the viewer/reader for completion.

"Edge effect" is an ecological term that has to do with the effect on an ecosystem of the juxtaposition of contrasting environments. The poems of Edge Effects have their connection to ecological matters, but they also ride other sorts of edge throughout, entering an unstable reality in which both time and space are given to uncanny shifting, so it's "easy to believe visible reality is merely one isolated phenomenon / among many."

Many of the poems in the book are inspired by paintings and drawings, but none of them is the standard ekphrastic exercise: Jan Conn's poems go deep. They are reinventions of often hyper-real environments — astonishingly rich and mobile, nightmarish, splintered, fragmentary and afflicted by flux. Readers of Edge Effects will be stirred by an involving, non-coercive, witnessing art of great power.

Jan Conn was brought up in Asbestos, Quebec. She now lives in Great Barrington, Massachusetts and is a professor of Biomedical Sciences whose research is focused on the genetics and ecology of mosquitoes. She has published seven previous books of poetry, most recently Botero’s Beautiful Horses (2009). Whisk, with Yoko’s Dogs, is forthcoming 2013 from Pedlar Press. Please visit yokosdogs.com

Jan Conn's profile page

"[Jan Conn's poetry] is embedded with contrast and contradictions, is harsh and pliable, full of starlight and fire and blood, and yet she achieves equilibrium that knocks the reader off kilter: look up from the page, steady yourself, and you are changed." - Janet Grafton, on Botero's Beautiful Horses

"For all of her scientific - I mean, accurate - observation, Conn arrives, surprisingly, at mysticism - Conn is a poet for thinkers who dream." - George Elliott Clarke, Maple Tree Literary Supplement

"This is thick, complex work, alive with art and magic, spiked with intricate structures of ecological and epistemic context, in mesh with vibrant lived experience." - Edie Steiner, The Goose

"This is a book to read, re-read and keep." - Jean Van Loon, Arc Poetry Magazine