In this companion to Governor General’s Award finalists Discovery Passages and Prairie Harbour, Garry Thomas Morse resumes his expansionist mapping of lyrical consciousness onto geographical concerns, acknowledging the unsettled edges of an imaginary territory. In Safety Sand, the reader is invited to step through a multilayered literary filter of uncanny allusions and cavalier translations to explore a nomadic Manitoba of the mind. Prairie surrealism is born!

In “Funereal Cocoons,” transformations of poems by Charles Baudelaire form a bridge between macabre visions of Paris during the 1850s and contemporary urban horrors that occur within the shadows of butterflies.
“Orphée through Glass” is a mystical triangulation involving Jack Spicer, Jean Cocteau, and Philip Glass, whose combined obsession with the Orpheus myth guides the reader through the arcane underworld of these poems. Explanatory notes are provided as imperfect mirrors of the poetic universe.

Rapid-fire poems in “Safe Spaces” are attentive to a structured musicality in our online interactions, tracing nano-aggressive threads of our language that cast judgment upon personal panopticons and fully realize Orwellian “hates” in wild emotional cycles that continually seek nourishment from repetitive media feeds. Trigger warnings not included.

“Ideas of North” extracts surrealist poems from the rocky landscape of the Boreal Shield, simultaneously re-enacting the mythic history of Flin Flon, Manitoba, and paying tribute to abstractionist Frank Stella and Canadian heldentenor Jon Vickers.

“Bones of the Last Bison,” the centrepiece of this collection, is an erasure exhibit that strips away the layers of Charles Mair’s celebrated poem “The Last Bison,” providing fractured commentary on Mair’s efforts to stir up hostility against Louis Riel and the provisional government in 1870, and also his early “environmentalist” work about the decline of the buffalo on the prairie, at once concealing and revealing what this has meant in practical and spiritual terms for Indigenous peoples.

Garry Thomas Morse’s poetry books with LINEBooks include sonic riffs on Rainer Maria Rilke’s sonnets in Transversals for Orpheus and a tribute to David McFadden’s poetic prose in Streams. His poetry books with Talonbooks include a homage to San Francisco Renaissance poet Jack Spicer in After Jack, and an exploration of his mother’s Kwakwaka’wakw First Nations ancestry in Discovery Passages (finalist for the Governor General’s Award for Poetry and the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, also voted One of the Top Ten Poetry Collections of 2011 by the Globe and Mail and One of the Best Ten Aboriginal Books from the past decade by CBC’s 8th Fire), and Prairie Harbour and Safety Sand.Morse’s books of fiction include his collection Death in Vancouver, and the three books in The Chaos! Quincunx series, including Minor Episodes / Major Ruckus (2013 ReLit Award finalist), Rogue Cells / Carbon Harbour (2014 ReLit Award finalist), and Minor Expectations, all published by Talonbooks.Morse is a casual commentator for Jacket2 and his work continues to appear in a variety of publications and is studied at various Canadian universities, including UBC. He currently resides in Winnipeg, Manitoba.

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