Description

might be a collection of cipher poems. Or not. The tension of appearance inheres in it, and ciphertexts seem to abound. As the poems take up their concealing evealing, coded/decoded, intelligence/counter-intelligence themes, borders and borderlands appear, are crossed, or are closed. Many of the borderlands turn out to be their own interiors "secret" workings of the codes ghosting through them. Are they abject castoffs, lost possibilities, proscribed mutations, or future events? Codes are hidden everywhere, sliding through the atmosphere, slipping into microwave towers, handheld devices, nervous systems, brains, retinas, bar codes, antimissile systems, the antennae of DNA, the traces of virtual particles, the Chauvet Cave drawings, your Twitter account. Each broaches a transformative version of its own transduction. The buck never stops. And since it's been documented that perception happens before we know it (Benjamin Libet), and the future might already have happened, these poems ask what this might mean especially in an accelerated, "semio-inflated" world of signs, words, and information. Maybe it's no wonder that the poems use tropes from spy thrillers and code breakers. In them a character may have been murdered, or moved to another dimension. Along the way strange perturbations occur to narrative and its others: memory, (prosthetic memory), dream, reportage, code, a little history of the future, deja vu, paramnesia, the virtual versions, evasions, and alternatives. Each poem gets read a few times, its code deciphered or ciphered back up. Some of the poems decay. Each reader reads his or her own poem and encodes it for another. What communication crosses out, these poems try to find. They might ask "What is reading?" while at the same time "Who are you?" In asking they acknowledge fragility, and in fragility, suggests William E. Connolly, lies the beginning of freedom.

Brian Henderson is the author of ten volumes of poetry (including a deck of visual poem-cards, The Alphamiricon), the latest of which, Sharawadji, was nominated for the Canadian Authors Association Award for Poetry in 2012. Nerve Language was a finalist for the Governor General's Award in 2007. His work, both critical and poetic, has appeared in a number of literary journals. He has a PhD in Canadian literature and is the director of Wilfred Laurier University Press. He has served as the president of the Association of Canadian University Presses, the treasurer of the Association of Canadian Publishers, and as a board member of Access Copyright, as well served on juries for the Manitoba Arts Council, the League of Canadian Poets, the Kitchener Public Library, and others. He is currently on the board of the Access Copyright Foundation and lives in Kitchener, Ontario, with his wife, Charlene Winger.