- Other People's Lives
- Chris Hutchinson
- 1-894078-75-6
- 978-1-894078-75-7
- 128
- 2009
- 6" × 8.75"
- $19.00
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Cover art:
"Night City # 4" by Joseph Siddiqi
e-book:
You can buy the e-book edition of this title from Kobo, Nook and the Sony Reader Store.Listen to Poems from Other People's Lives
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
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On Writing, with Chris Hutchinson - read about Chris Hutchinson and his writing process
On-line literary magazine ditch includes 9 poems excerpted from Other People’s Lives in anthology 4. To read these poems by Chris Hutchinson, go to pages 80 to 89
Chris Hutchinson reads excerpts from Cross Sections at the 49th Parallel reading, AWP Conference Chicago, February 14, 2009.
"Shivering Romantic": An Interview with Chris Hutchinson - Submitted by Open Book Toronto Guest on August 7, 2009 - By Alessandro Porco
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.
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)
- TABLE MUSIC: Consciousness and Sense: Chris Hutchinson and Sue Sinclair by Chris Banks, February 28, 2010 (chrisbanksy.blogspot.com)
- Chris Hutchinson: Not Unlike by Sean Johnston (Ryga: A Journal of Provocations, Number 2, Winter 2010)
- Chris Hutchinson, Other People's Lives, Brick Books, 2009 by Nick Thran (Event 39/2 (Fall 2010))
- Words and Worlds by Aaron Giovannone (Canadian Literature - issue 207, winter 2010)
Books of related interest
- The Vicinity by David O'Meara
