Kirjahaku

Jonas in Frames is [choose one]: A) a series of loosely connected narrative fragments written in poetic prose; B) a maze of postcard stories bursting with literary in-jokes; C) a delicate sequence of prose poems interspersed with narrative interludes; or D) haunted by the ghost of Samuel Beckett. In its esoteric glimpse into the disassociated, Jonas in Frames contorts time and space. Rootless, nostalgic, socially inept, Jonas is the modern questless hero, an exemplar of generational anxiety eternally on the brink of pitching into a graveyard spin. A volatile amalgamation of identity crisis, fitful employment, and fanciful poetic imaginings delivers Jonas from sterile offices to anarchist squats, from skull-shattering saloons to faux-edgy hipstervilles and back again to capital-N Nowhere. As Jonas navigates an onslaught of geographical, mental, and temporal turbulence, his lives collide, splinter, and too often shatter. Jonas in Frames does and does not cohere. Its sense is clandestine. Its form is fractal.

With his restless intellectual curiosity tempered by a dash of witty self-deprecation, Hutchinson deftly manoeuvres through hallowed halls of academia with humour and grace. Three stylistically distinct sections, "Imago", "A Brief History of the Short-Lived" and "Serialist" are interwoven throughout the collection, showcasing the range of Hutchinson's poetic ability. The "Brief History" poems explode from the page in densely allusive bursts of energy, clusters of images fired off at a rapid pace: "He is wearing a green felt / Fedora with an ostrich plume which bursts into flame the moment I drop / A three-sided coin into his outstretched flipper." By contrast, the "Imago" and "Serialist" sections are quieter and more meditative, though no less inventive or rich in imagery: "Rhetoric is big business / as Byzantine networks / replace its circle of friends." By turns gleefully irreverent, thoughtful and too clever for its own good, "A Brief History of the Short-Lived" defies description -- it must be read to be believed.

The richness of memory is a curse and a gift.Twisting and turning against the soul-sicknesses of late-capitalism, Chris Hutchinson's new collection of poems scrolls through myriad moods and aesthetic guises, by turns hallucinatory, despondent, and serene. Authenticity and artifice collide and collude. Political and personal boundaries blur as do the categorical divisions between content and form. Imagine an architecture of breezeways, a freeway of exit ramps, a literature of repurposed literary conventions, the past "re-presented" in endless waves of arrival.Here we find a nostalgia for modernist disjuncture, there a yearning for symbolist depth, and everywhere a fondness for surfaces which, ironically, coax the reader to peel back the stylish veneer.Haunted by a weird range of historical personages, while travelling from Houston to the moon and several places in between, the lyric "I" bears witness to its own endless destruction and reconstitution.At once escapist and socially engaged, Hutchinson's poems enact the ephemeral and fluid nature of our linguistic experiences, tracing those ecstatically tortuous processes by which we might sometimes find, even in the midst of loss, the value of our lives beyond the spheres of war, toxic rhetoric, and neo-liberal commerce.