Edge Effects

Conn, Jan

ISBN 10: 1926829778 / ISBN 13: 9781926829777

Published by Brick Books, 2012

About this Item

Signed. Signed/ dated by author.

Seller Inventory # mon0004172485

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Edge Effects
• Publisher: Brick Books
• Publication Date: 2012
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1926829778
• ISBN 13: 9781926829777
• Binding: paperback
• Condition: Good
• Signed: Signed by Author(s)

About this title

Synopsis

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.

About the Author

Jan Conn was brought up in Asbestos, Quebec. She now lives in Great Barrington, Massachusetts and works as a professor of Biomedical Sciences whose research is focused on mosquitoes, their evolution and ecology. She has published seven previous books of poetry.