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"Neil Surkan's new poetry collection articulates a fierce vision of reality, in which human lives are small and fragile because they exist at the edges of a great natural world in which death is simply a neutral fact. Surkan's poems are surprising, often witty Surkan's poems are surprising, often witty. They move energetically from line to line, doubling their meaning, carrying the reader along with a densely knotted assonance that evokes the rhythms of Anglo-Saxon accentual verse, but Surkan's attention to technique is never at the expense of feeling. In fact, it sharpens and directs each poem's emotional thrust. Hope vies against doubt, while the speaker, ever mindful that he is one among many, asks what it means to be a person and a man - a son, a grandson, a husband, and a father." James Arthur, author of
The Suicide's Son
About the author
Neil Surkan is the author of the poetry collection
On High and the chapbooks
Their Queer Tenderness and
Super, Natural. He lives in Calgary.
Summary
Unbecoming, Neil Surkan's sophomore collection, clings to hope while the world deteriorates, transforms, and grows less hospitable from moment to moment. Interplaying tenderness with dogged perseverance, these poems tumble through vignettes of degraded landscapes, ebbing spiritual communities, faltering men, and precarious friendships.
