Digging a bit into Michael Dennis and his poetry blog quickly led me to rob mclennan, another poet (and frequent blogger) also based in Ottawa. He has a number of poetry collections, and I am currently reading and processing The Ottawa City Project. However, today I am reviewing a shorter collection called The Uncertainty Principle.
The pieces are all extremely short, and are either short prose poems (some as short as a sentence and a hashtag (borrowed from Twitter)) or micro-fiction. I don't think it really matters either way, but I am considering this as a work of poetry.
Not all of the pieces are humourous or droll; some cover more serious topics or are even melancholy. However, the ones that grabbed me are the lighter pieces.
There is a running gag about a Twitter-like hashtag #IDon'tHaveFactstoBackThisUp, which is one way, I suppose, to pre-empt the users who insist on #Citations Please. Naturally, this is applied to a number of urban legends, such as "Radium tastes like butttermilk" or "Winnepeg was founded by cheese moguls."
I'll just pick out a few poems I enjoyed to give you a sense of the collection, as it is essentially a mosaic of many small insights and images.
"If you don't eat your cookie, your fortune can't happen. ... I once had a cookie offer the same fortune three times over ... I knew the universe was trying to tell me something."
"When she was thirty years old, she discovered that all of her problems stemmed from a single flaw: she was wearing a bra three sizes too small."
"She declares, half-serious, that she wants a baby or a dog or a cat or an orchid. I tell her a dog is out of the question."
"I've wondered if I would actually want to live forever, and the only concern I have is memory."
These extracts may make it seem a bit more like a comic routine by Steven Wright than it actually is, but this is still broadly representative of The Uncertainty Principle. There are a few reviews of this book, but I'll just link to this one from Broken Penci , which gets right to the point.
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