Jeramy Dodds reading a selection from his book "Crabwise to the Hounds"

Attended the fall Coach House Books launch at The Stones Place in Toronto on Oct 9, 08 to see (& listen) to my good friend Jeramy Dodds reading a selection from his book "Crabwise to the Hounds". Congratulations on the book Jeramy!

http://www.chbooks.com/catalogue/index.php?ISBN=1552452050

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 Dodd'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.