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Precision-built poems that attempt CPR on their own irregular meter, on their own unreliable meaning.
Vancouver poet Shaun Robinson's If You Discover a Fire is a debut collection of poems that make a virtue of their failure to communicate. They forage through the syntax and vocabulary of late-night voicemails, letters to the editor, songs invented in the shower, professional jargon, "Witness Wanted" signs, technical manuals, and text-message typos to assemble verbal collages that raise more questions than they answer. In settings ranging from Montreal's Mile End to a commercial flight above the Midwest to a wildfire in the mountains of British Columbia, these are poems rooted in working-class Canadian experience, poems that flirt with both safety and danger, that drone on like drunken strangers in a bar. Gathering reference from weather reports, football announcers, aerial disappearances, and the movie Groundhog Day, these poems sound their forlorn yawp through the alleys of East Vancouver.
"Out on the porch, between shots, he tells you
things you've always known, how the past
and the future are lovers spooning
in bed, and the present is how they don't
quite fit together"
— "Carpe Dos and Carpe Don'ts (ft. Panda Bear)"
"In his tonally slippery, pithy, punchy and, by turns, irreverent and heartbreaking debut, If You Discover a Fire, Shaun Robinson creates a richly entropic world in which we find ourselves displaced along the fringes of modernity. Robinson recognizes the mind's drive to make of the present and past a trajectory that would propel us into the future and smartly frustrates the momentum with lyric aplomb, asking us to reconsider what we thought we were looking at."—Michael Prior
"Darkly comic, or just plain dark, these poems offers no assurances, but as the particulars accumulate—all-night gyms, boredom, plastic flowers, rec rooms where children in blindfolds swing wildly at air—they generate a vital, unpredictable force. Like the octopus that sets loose the lid of the jar it's been placed in, If You Discover A Fire has the imagination to outsmart the world's relentless conditions."—Sheryda Warrener
"'How Soon, How Likely, How Severe' another standout poem, one of many in the collection dealing in a poetics of place, is anchored in the geography of British Columbia. In this piece the speaker reflects on fighting wildfires, in a kind of exhausted apocalyptic, that feels part-pastoral, part-confessional"—Michael Edwards, Arc Poetry Magazine
"Robinson's easy, conversational style belies a purposeful minimalism...There's just enough echo to bring out the ghostly patterns and paradoxes of personal growth."—Carl Watts, Canadian Literature
"Shaun Robinson gives us the running on empty version of apocalypse, still on fire, the existential version abbreviated in his cover page drawing, a startling glimpse of hope in hell on earth, one flickering match."—Linda Rogers, The British Columbia Review
"If You Discover A Fireby Shaun Robinson is a powerful debut whose signature qualities—a strong sense of description and a powerful guiding intellect—combine to make the poems not just spark, but burst forth into flames."—Chris Banks, The Miramichi Reader
,Shaun Robinson's poetry has appeared in The Puritan, The Malahat Review, Prairie Fire, Poetry is Dead, and The Rusty Toque, and received Honourable Mention in ARC Magazine's 2018 Poem of the Year contest. Born in 100 Mile House, BC, Robinson has lived in Vancouver since 2006. He studied in UBC's Creative Writing MFA program, where he served as the poetry editor of PRISM international. He is also the author of the chapbook Manmade Clouds and currently works as an editor for the chapbook press Rahila's Ghost. If You Discover a Fire is his debut collection.