Infinite Citizen Of The Shaking Tent

A stunning debut book of poems from a bold new voice unafraid to engage with the exigencies of our contemporary world.

Infinite Citizens of the Shaking Tent explores a poetics of uncertainty and troubled ecology. It takes the reader on a journey of self formation and questioning, from the stark wilderness of the Boreal forest into urban cacophony and material plenitude. It confronts the problem of language as a conduit for consciousness through which we must provide an account of ourselves and exist as political subjects. What is unsayable? How can I know myself? The poems remix language from cognitive neuroscience, philosophy, literary theory, and environmental science to defamiliarize received notions of the natural world and what it means to be human. Many of the poems are also deeply personal and chronicle a childhood of poverty in a fading northern Ontario lumber town and a struggle toward knowledge. They are reflective of states of doubleness- of the poet being of both European and Indigenous ancestry, of being formed by a staggeringly wild landscape and then residing in a city, of striving for certainty and exactitude through science and ultimately embracing the expansive potential of poetry.