Reveries of a Solitary Biker

Description

A two-part response to Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Reveries of a Solitary Walker, this series of linked poems considers the difficulties of living in a capitalist world, women's labor, and constructions of value. Catriona Strang is an interdisciplinary feminist poet, founding member of the Institute for Domestic Research, and the author of Corked (2014).

Catriona Strang, a founding member of the Institute for Domestic Research, and former member of the Kootenay School of Writing collective, is the author of Low Fancy and co-author with the late Nancy Shaw of Busted, Cold Trip, and Light Sweet Crude. Her collection of poetic responses to Proust, Corked, was published in 2014. She lives in Vancouver, where she and her two kids are active in the local home-learning community, and where she teaches at Simon Fraser University.

Reviews for author's previous work "In Catriona Strang's poetry, the domestic sphere is comfortably private (spherically shaped) only because a globalized technological continuum of warfare and manufacture makes it so ... Corked touches down through vast internal distances to find a spring of our condition - as seen from here, 'the Strang terrain' - in Marcel Proust. The super-fine instrumentation of these poems sends back big data on the intonational and rhythmical contours of intimacy undertaking to live in a continuous (relentless) present tense. Live it." - Louis Cabri "[Corked is] a poetic, political, and affective Ingram CoreSource that recalibrates how a poem might work today as a representation of a moment that is both precarious and self-assured, contradictory and confident. Yet, along with its consideration of this 'immobilized' present, there is a compelling historical depth to this book built through an address to Marcel Proust. Strang uses the engagement with Proust as a 'coincidental hook' to make a powerful poetic report on 'the current situation' by looping it through other historical contexts ... From her early work, TEM and Low Fancy, through her collaboration with the late Nancy Shaw, with Corked, Strang solidifies a unique position in Canadian poetry." - Jeff Derksen