Peter Norman

The Gun That Starts the Race Peter Norman First edition

Commendation Quotes: ""The Gun That Starts the Race" takes aim and never misses. No word is wasted or feels out of place. Norman hits the bull's-eye with every killer lyric. These poems are sardonic, mordant, and ironic in a suck-it-up sense. But the subjects that Norman worries come wrapped in wit. Like Sylvia Plath, he sees existence as a caustic comedy, the beautiful flesh bathed in acid. So, "an itch indicates healing, you think. / The kisses of an unseen porcupine / or acupunctured rat," Beware. For Norman, "Paradise" is a virtual anagram of "despair."" -- George Elliott Clarke, author of "Traverse" and "Execution Poems"Jacket Description/Back: Peter Norman finds the uncanny in the everyday. His poems surprise you, making you laugh and weep (sometimes simultaneously) with recognition at the fleeting spark of existence. Like archaeological sites between the "strum und drang" of our daily dramas, Norman's poems excavate playgrounds freshly vacated, graves until recently inhabited, basements and dark corners where life and death go on without us. They present us with a world that lives and breathes and endures, where we are simply transitory visitors. Commendation Quotes: ""The Gun That Starts the Race" is a bang on (pun intended) title for this impressive new collection from a poet of imminence and aftermath. As vigorous in execution as they are detached in tone, Peter Norman's poems are finely formed odes to defining absences. He's a singular writer whose poems linger, riddling." -- Stephanie Bolster, author of "A Page from the Wonders of Life on Earth" and "White Stone: The Alice Poems" Contributor Bio:  Norman, Peter Peter Norman is the author of two previous poetry collections, "Water Damage" and "At the Gates of the Theme Park" (shortlisted for the 2010 Trillium Poetry Book Award), and a novel, "Emberton" (2014). His fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, including "The Walrus" and two editions of "Best Canadian Poetry".