Weight (Revised Canadian Edition)

The poetry of Weight is situated on the sharpest available intersection of two extremes: the blandly narrative, and the wildly disjunctive and polydimensional. The degree to which this tension is made explicit varies througout the collection, which ranges from the totally atomized to the obliquely ruminative. Linearity, though always present in some degree, is constantly frustrated, either by intrusions of foreign elements or through formal distortions. Thoughts are abruptly interrupted, sometimes mid-word, only to re-emerge later precisely where they left off, as through a worm hole; or else washed-out and exhausted, like driftwood, leaving only the bare bones of an incoherent memory.

Finely-tuned degrees of opacity fluctuate from poem to poem and even from word to word, pointing out the productive tension inherent in all situations between more or less cogent surface qualities and a much denser shadow zone. Is this all just a distortion of some essentially unambiguous narrative, or is it the thing itself, presented with all its wrong angles and jutting inconsistencies? The resolution of this question, though implied, is indefinitely delayed; all one can do is wait.

Samuel Andreyev was born in Kincardine, Ontario in 1981, and grew up in Toronto. A composer, oboist and poet, he has been active in the Canadian small press since the late ‘90s, mainly as editor and publisher of The Expert Press (now Trepex). In 2003 he moved to Paris, France, where he is currently studying composition at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique de Paris.