Longlisted for the 2010 ReLit Award

Exciting music, delicious ironies, radiant self-awareness.

With imagination, wit and scrupulous candour, Chris Hutchinson’s poems negotiate and renegotiate the shifting no-man’s-land between self and others, introspection and public life. Here are poems carrying unflinching perceptions on their own innovative, edgy music, refusing inflations of rhetoric and complacent notions of the inner life, bringing skeptical intelligence and radical imagination-those supposedly incompatible room-mates-into electrical connection. The result is a poetry of daring honesty, close observation, and humanity, executed with exhilarating verve and humour.

Each day’s a notch on the oven dial
the sadistic hand of summer turns. The locals here
wear mirrored glasses with the mirrors reversed!
Was I ever filled with sweetness and courage?
For miles and miles the asphalt unwinds, the river’s
evil twin. So is desire your enemy’s friend,
goes the jazz of imagined footsteps

slapping the city’s impervious skin. So each day
lapses, un-spools each night as I go scheming
ways to continue, safe within and darkly through
an immaterial sublime. But the walls are sweating
and the windows here peer in towards this sheltered
corner of the universe-where I’m in trouble again
with words, and other people’s lives.

– from “Cross-Sections”

“A tender work of trouble and troubles, cracked language, courage. Peer into the cocked eye of this book and discover yourself staring back. A maker of strange and wonder, Chris Hutchinson writes poems that ‘shimmer, break softly open, at once ourselves, and other.'” – Matt Rader