Here

In this new collection, Colin Browne approaches the narratives of history, memory, and place as sites of occupation. The writing is urgent and reflective, often autobiographical, advancing by means of juxtaposition and montage to probe the embers of the past lying unextinguished in the present. Here is a condition, a vortex of archaic desire flooded by the moon of memory. Among the imagined and terrestrial topographies are the Highlands of Scotland, the British Columbia Interior, Paris, Vancouver Island, Central America, Tokyo, Walden Pond, the Northwest Coast, and Raymond Roussel’s Timbuktu. Alternately dismayed, humbled, bemused, confessional, rueful, funny, topical, and propelled by a polyrhythmic score in a field of intertextual voices, Here is infused with Browne’s current research and includes autobiographical narratives, translations, conversations, chance discoveries, a modest libretto, accounts of his grandparents, documentary fragments, and a suite of improvisational prose texts with the immediacy of a daybook. Ear is arbiter. Composed serially, every page of Here takes on the nature of a loom, with the pattern of the whole yet to be discerned.