Other People's Lives by Chris Hutchinson

Other People's Lives
  • Other People's Lives
  • Chris Hutchinson
  • 1-894078-75-6
  • 978-1-894078-75-7
  • 128
  • July
  • 6" × 8.75"
  • $19.00

to buy with PayPal or a Credit Card

 

 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

******************************************

On-line literary magazine ditch includes 9 poems excerpted from Other People’s Lives in anthology 3 (canadian men) (innovative poets).  To read these poems, go to pages 104 to 113 at http://issuu.com/ditchpoetry/docs/ditch_anthology_3_men

Chris Hutchinson reads from the new book on YouTube - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5qOpXxrUPo - Chris Hutchinson reads excerpts from Cross Sections at the 49th Parallel reading, AWP Conference Chicago, February 14, 2009. 

Telepathic Exercises: The Chris Hutchinson Interview - Books on the Radio has finally launched! The first interview was conducted in the front room of the temporarily empty Kelowna home of poet Chris Hutchinson. During the interview we discussed te...lepathy, Henry Miller’s the Tropic of Cancer, Sharon Thesen, institutionalized poets and John Coltrane.

Chris’ new book of poems is called ‘Other People’s Lives‘ and is published by Brick Books

You can purchase a copy at any quality independent bookstore.

You can listen to the interview by clicking here http://booksontheradio.wordpress.com/2009/09/16/telepathic-exercises-the-chris-hutchinson-interview-ep-01/

Reviews

  • Poetry Review: Othering People's Lives by J.A. Weingarten (Maple Tree Literary Supplement, in association with Carleton University's English Department)
  • POETRY: Montreal's whisy damp permeates first collection by Ariel Gordon (Winnipeg Free Press, January 23, 2010)
  • Books of related interest