ANDREYEV, Samuel. Weight. Toronto: BookThug, 2006. First Canadian Edition (revised). Wrappers. 215x142mm. 22pp. Fine.

One of 100 copies issued.

The poetry of Weight is situated on the sharpest available intersection of two extremes: the blandly narrative, and the wildly disjunctive and poly-dimensional. The degree to which this tension is made explicit varies throughout the collection, which ranges from the totally atomized to the obliquely ruminative. Linearity, though always present in some degree, is constantly frustrated, either by intrusions of foreign elements or through formal distortions. Thoughts are abruptly interrupted, sometimes mid-word, only to re-emerge later precisely where they left off, as through a worm hole; or else washed-out and exhausted, like driftwood, leaving only the bare bones of an incoherent memory. Finely-tuned degrees of opacity fluctuate from poem to poem and even from word to word, pointing out the productive tension inherent in all situations between more or less cogent surface qualities and a much denser shadow zone. Is this all just a distortion of some essentially unambiguous narrative, or is it the thing itself, presented with all its wrong angles and jutting inconsistencies? The resolution of this question, though implied, is indefinitely delayed; all one can do is wait.