A book of lyrics, fragmented, extended, and recovered, which read as a single long poem.

The Luskville Reductions records a year in the life of a small Quebec town and the marriage that disintegrates there. While a book about loss, it is also a book about the state of becoming that coexists with change, the imbalance that for a time makes everything lucid, all the details adding up to much more than only an "us." The visible goes beyond mere facts in these poems, transformed into the deeply seen - and therefore sacred.

The problem with daylilies
is the usual contemporary twaddle: how is it
we know anything
now that you're gone.

What do you mean
now that you're gone?

What do you mean
daylilies?

"Marry the passionate grief of By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept with the pared-down utterances of Beckett's lost men and you might arrive at The Luskville Reductions. While it evokes the dark cry of the lover in ‘O Western Wind,' this long poem is entirely contemporary in its ontological alertness, its wry ironies. At once threnody and enactment of loss, it brings something utterly new into the corpus of Canadian poetry. It is a brilliantly achieved poem." -- Mary Dalton

Monty Reid is a Canadian poet living in Ottawa. His most recent collection is The Luskville Reductions (Brick, 2008). Recent chapbooks include Site Conditions (Apt 9), Contributors' Notes (Gaspereau) and Moan Coach (above/ground) along with Garden units from a variety of small presses. Much of Garden appeared as Facebook posts in 2012 and his current long work, Intelligence, appeared on Twitter throughout 2013. Other online work can be found at Dusie, elimae, Drain, ottawater, Truck, experiment-o and elsewhere. Recent print work can be seen in the Peter F Yacht Club, the Malahat Review, Grain, Prairie Fire and other magazines.He plays guitar and mandolin with the band Call Me Katie.

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