- Edge Effects
- Jan Conn
- 1-926829-77-8
- 978-1-926829-77-7
- 95
- 2012
- 6" × 8.75"
- $19.00
to buy with PayPal or a Credit Card
Cover art:
Photograph of East Greenbush, NY artist Suzanne Hicks' colour palette.
Listen to Poems from Edge Effects
Mature poems with their finger on the pulse of the dark side of the present.
Reading Edge Effects, Jan Conn’s masterful eighth collection, is a little like looking at Edward Burtynsky’s photographs of real industrial wastelands; both visions are as gorgeous as they are terrifying, platforms for thought, even for activism, depending as they do on the energy of the viewer/reader for completion.
“Edge effect” is an ecological term that has to do with the effect on an ecosystem of the juxtaposition of contrasting environments. The poems of Edge Effects have their connection to ecological matters, but they also ride other sorts of edge throughout, entering an unstable reality in which both time and space are given to uncanny shifting, so it’s “easy to believe visible reality is merely one isolated phenomenon / among many.”
Many of the poems in the book are inspired by paintings and drawings, but none of them is the standard ekphrastic exercise: Jan Conn’s poems go deep. They are reinventions of often hyper-real environments—astonishingly rich and mobile, nightmarish, splintered, fragmentary and afflicted by flux. Readers of Edge Effects will be stirred by an involving, non-coercive, witnessing art of great power.
“Where are the sources of the self? I need to find mine
and give them a good shaking.”
(from "Disturbance in the Key of B")
"[Jan Conn's poetry] is embedded with contrast and contradictions, is harsh and pliable, full of starlight and fire and blood, and yet she achieves equilibrium that knocks the reader off kilter: look up from the page, steady yourself, and you are changed." - Janet Grafton, from The Goose about Botero's Beautiful Horses
Poets in Profile: Jan Conn - Interview with Jan Conn at Open Book: Ontario
More Brick Books by Jan Conn
Reviews
- Jan Conn on Thresholds and Edges by H.L. Hix (In Quire, December 16, 2012)
- Worlds at the Brink: Jan Conn's Edge Effects by Jean Van Loon (Arc Poetry Magazine, February 15, 2013)
- Edge Effects by Jan Conn by Neil Leadbeater (Galatea Resurrects #20 (A Poetry Engagement), May 9, 2013)
