A Doctor Pedalled Her Bicycle Over the River Arno
carries within it all the technique, vision, imaginative labour and razor precision of Matt Rader’s first two collections but ascends, also, to a luminous, demanding, particularized realm of the human we all recognize as the world we’re meant to live in. Whether stranded in a Git’ksan village in northern B.C. or a hallucinatory pensione in modern Italy, these eloquent, troubled poems are the voice we wanted for the night. These poems are unassuming, deeply spirited, and expansive and show us again how contemporary lyric can go such a long way toward revealing our true homes to us at the moment we find ourselves most nakedly un-housed. Rader seeks out limits, borders, and frontiers — those mapped for us by authority, and their concomitant, interior shadow lines we ourselves draw — in order to test their validity. If Borges had imagined an atlas of our layered identities, it might look like these songs. Here is the astounding collection from a thrilling new voice in poetry.