"Two Riders, Four Werewolves"
Broadside of Jeramy Dodds' poem 'Two Riders, Four Werewolves,' from his collection, Crabwise to the Hounds. Designed, typeset and printed by Kevin King in a limited edition of 50. Printed on Mohawk Carrara paper.
Purr Chase
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Crabwise to the Hounds
Read an except from Crabwise to the Hounds here
Listen to poems from Crabwise to the Hounds here
Price: $16.95 CAD
The most exciting Canadian debut this year, hands down. - A Poetry Foundation Book of the Year.
I’m not sure how Dodds does it and I don’t really care; this is exhilarating, jumped-up, clattering music born in the vibrating gap of pure potential between perceiver and the world. - Ken Babstock
Crabwise to the Hounds is akin to having your room lit up by sheet lightning. - The Toronto Star
Strange, densely layered, ruthless and funny by turns, these poems ... force us to go slow at their sudden ingrown turns. They are full of creature music surprises. - The CBC Literary Awards Jury
…a landmark of Canadian poetry. - The Mansfield Revue
Dodds is incapable of writing a dull line ... brilliant. - Winnipeg Free Press
His hiatuses bloom on the kitchen's sill.
His shirt snaps like tiny animals falling
through branches. In stride with the clock's
hypnotics, his throat chops a glass of water
down.
With cameos by jackalopes, Glenn Gould, homemade spaceships and Carl Linnaeus, these poems are astonishing for their technical agility and their restless inventiveness. There's an elegance here that matches Dodds's impulse to challenge the reader with fresh metaphor and remarkable phrasing; the formal ambitions of many of the poems in Crabwise to the Hounds are balanced by an inclination toward wordplay and bright musicality.
Humorous at times, yet always handled with consummate craft, these poems invoke historical figures like Hiram Bingham and Ho Chi Minh even as they traverse a poetic landscape that includes telephone-game-style translations, interpretive-dance poems on historic paintings and carnivalesque jaunts into a natural world overrun with mules, Alsatians, lions and motorcycle-sized deer.
Crabwise to the Hounds is a startling debut from the winner of the CBC Literary Award and the Bronwen Wallace Award.
Rev Ewes
Chris Hutchinson on Jeramy Dodds
Purr Chase