Original, jarring, and unforgettable, here is the latest collection from Griffin Poetry Prize finalist Shane Book.
The author of the acclaimed 2014 collection, Congotronic, returns with urgent, forceful, and energetic new poems. Once again, Shane Book's poems take readers around the globe and showcase his talent for layering voice, diction, and rhythm in a staggeringly original and innovative way.
The Rio Communiqué
Gusts thwacked tarps. Meat smells ricocheted
plank to post. We gave up as we can, to another goal:
green fruit. No way to know at that very moment
a marauding group with a megaphone
filed toward the Candomblé sector, throwing political shadows
like the Mont Ste. Marie snow-making machine noise
twisting narrowly past boulders, ice shelves--
steep banked ice shelves too savage for anything but
caterpillar treads--the sound's angle tipped up on its sharpest edge
each pine needle felt as winter's advent
but also, the clarity that months and months of silence
had ended battering every feather, signaling the strangest
permanence. No snow in this part of the hemisphere,
we remember how to use the bowl of teeth, the tealeaf headdress. Still,
the specter shuffles closer, farther, waiting, wending like a wasp,
a field of wasps, unfinished, pointing a way.

SHANE BOOK grew up in Canada and Ghana. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, an MA in English and American Literature from New York University, an MFA in Film and Media Arts from Temple University and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. His first volume of poetry, Ceiling of Sticks, won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize and the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award and was a Poetry Society of America "New Poet" Selection. Excerpts from Ceiling of Sticks received The Malahat Review Long Poem Prize and a National Magazine Award. His second collection, Congotronic, won the Archibald Lampman Award, was a Kuhl House Poets Series Selection, and was a finalist for the Canadian Authors Association Award, the Ottawa Book Award, and the Griffin Poetry Prize. He is Associate Professor of Writing at the University of Victoria.