If you’ve ever wanted “to read with the page turned/upside-down, craving a different perspective,” you’ll want to enter Unfamiliar Weather, a world of beauty and menace, where “electricity floats just above the surface/of events, phosphorescent/as the ghosts of jellyfish.” Beneath the glittering glaciers, you can hear the sound of boulders shifting “like knuckles cracking before a fight,” and witness a wind storm that threatens to turn loose the “wilderness waiting in everything,” revealing the bare terrain of human isolation. In this turbulent, unpredictable climate, Chris Hutchinson’s deft, intelligent poems explore our place in the world, our relationships to nature, to each other, to language, and to art.
News & Reviews
“Unfamiliar Weather (The Muses’ Company) is a first book of poems by Chris Hutchinson, who isn’t so tempered in his questions but plunges into them head-first and thirsty. These poems are afflicted by rain and sometimes flooded. Though the rain may be familiar, what it brings isn’t: loneliness and lost cats, tombstones and spiders, love and a warm bed and all the resulting complications. I am surprised and also grateful for Hutchinson’s boldness. Even the ghazals aren’t spared. We are taught that poems are supposed to be so careful. But how to be careful with a life that’s messy? Unfamiliar Weather offers up poems that are an unlikely balance of fine and fierce.” —Geist
About the Author
Chris Hutchinson is a poet and educator. His books include Unfamiliar Weather, Other People’s Lives, A Brief History of the Short-lived, Jonas in Frames: an Epic, and In the Vicinity of Riches. Hutchinson won the 2003 Earle Birney Prize for Poetry. He lives in Vancouver.
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