Signal Fires

Christopher Dewdney’s love for the landscape and the flora and fauna of southwestern Ontario has provoked some of the most gorgeously erotic prose ever to appear in this country. From that love, augmented by ardent research in the field, emerges a marvellously compelling, futuristic vision of time and space collapsed into near-simultaneity. Books IV and V of The Natural History of Southwestern Ontario, presented in Signal Fires, are self-contained sections of a continuing prose poem deeply satisfying in its density. The New-Old World of this long poem, written over a fifteen-year period, is sensuously and conceptually so immediate that orgasm and epiphany are one in it. This is writing, and reading, as immersion. Accompanying the natural histories in Signal Fires are poems with a different but equally involving music, lyrics of loss and redemption in which human relationships are central.

Christopher Dewdney has published more than eleven volumes of poetry. He has been nominated for the Governor General’s Award three times and has won first prize in the CBC Literary Competition for poetry. He is also a media and culture commentator, and appears on TVO’s Studio 2 among other television and radio programs. Dewdney lives in Toronto, where he teaches writing and Cultural Studies at York University.