Hypothesis

John Barton's Hypothesis brilliantly maps the incidental acts of love and separation that mark our carnal and itinerant search for place. What is most striking about these poems is the candor, vulnerability, and tenderness with which they confront the realities of loss. Travelling through landscapes of the body, the metropolis, and the open road, Hypothesis explores the narratives of science, the experiments of medicine, and the desolation of environmental collapse to find what endures. One poem builds upon another until they create of themselves a timeless collection capped by a powerful homoerotic elegy for Canada's moment and place. The immediacy, passion, and intelligence of the collection are given force by technical genius: Barton's deft use of the line, skewed for momentum, generates a rolling cadence that does not give us false crescendos but is processional. John Barton's language redeems what otherwise seems a fractious, evasive world. Book jacket.

John Barton is a three-time winner of the Archibald Lampman Award for Poetry, including for his previous book with Anansi, Designs from the Interior. His work appears in all of Canada's premier literary journals. Barton lives in Ottawa, where he co-edits Arc: Canada's National Poetry Magazine