Rush Hour is a rivetting collection of spoken word poems written and performed by one of North America’s most powerful new literary voices.

Catherine Hunter was the 1998 winner of the Manitoba Book of the Year for her poetry collection Latent Heat.

Rush Hour includes a “bonus track” recording of the title poem with music accompaniment by the smash hit band The Weakerthans.

Catherine Hunter's last poetry collection, Latent Heat, won the McNally Robinson Manitoba Book of the Year Award. Four of the poems in St. Boniface Elegies, originally published in Contemporary Verse 2, won the Manitoba Magazine Award for Best Poem or Suite of Poems and earned Honorable Mention in the National Magazine Awards. Her most recent novel, After Light (Signature), spans four generations of an Irish-American-Canadian family in a tale of love, war, trauma, and the power of art, and was a finalist for the Margaret Laurence Award for Fiction, the Carol Shields Winnipeg Book Award, the McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award, the Mary Scorer Award for Best Book by a Manitoba Publisher, and the High Plains Book Award for Best Woman Writer. She has also published several mysteries with Ravenstone/Turnstone, and recorded a spoken word CD (Rush Hour, from Cyclops Press, with a bonus track by The Weakerthans). Her writing has appeared in the literary journals The Malahat Review, Prism International, Essays on Canadian Writing, Matrix, West Coast Line, Prairie Fire, CV2, and Grain, and the anthologies The Echoing Years: Contemporary Poetry from Canada and Ireland; Post Prairie: An Anthology of New Poetry; Best Canadian Poems 2013; Best Canadian Poems 2015; and (forthcoming) Best Canadian Poems 2019. She edited Exposed, an anthology of five new women poets, and Before the First Word: The Poetry of Lorna Crozier, and for ten years she was the editor of The Muses' Company poetry press. Since 1991, she has enjoyed teaching literature and creative writing at the University of Winnipeg.

Catherine Hunter's profile page

“The true gem on this CD is the second version of the title poem, ‘Rush Hour,’ with musical accompaniment by The Weakerthans. The piece is imbued with an unaccountable energy as if Hunter, like us, is hearing the track for the first time.

It is gripping. The music adds an ethereal dimension that complements the haunting nature of the poem. It makes one wonder how we have dared to listen to poetry without musical accompaniment.”

—The Winnipeg Free Press