Opening doors, dreaming awake, tracing networks of music and meaning, Marlatt s poetry stands out as an essential engagement with what matters to anyone writing with a social-environmental conscience. "Rivering" includes poems inspired by the village of Steveston where, before the war, a Japanese-Canadian community lived within the rhythms of salmon on the Fraser River delta. Also gathered into "Rivering" lesbian love poetry from "Touch to my Tongue"; a transformance of Nicole Brossard s "Mauve"; passages from "The Given," winner of the 2009 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize; a traditional Kuri song from the Noh drama, "The Gull"; and an unpublished excerpt from the chamber opera Shadow Catch.
Difficult, beautiful, heart-breaking realities of the twenty-first century are urgently immediate in selections from "Liquidities: Vancouver Poems Then and Now." All of the poems speak to Marlatt s poetics of place and of language as passage between distant or disparate human beings, and between human beings and the more-than-human world. The selections are framed by Susan Knutson s deeply attentive critical introduction and by Marlatt s immediacies of writing, a new lyrical essay investigating the act of writing. Closing with a walking meditation situated by her Buddhist practice, "Rivering" is both a pocket Marlatt and an introduction to one of the best poets of our time. "