Description
Book SynopsisOne of the first lines of
X, Shane Rhodes'' sixth book of poetry, is a warning: this book of verse demands more of verse, this book demands perversity. He goes on to write:
This book is about where I live, a place still settling, still making the land--law by law, arrest by arrest, jail by jail--its own
snow blown
Heed this warning. In
X, Rhodes takes poetry from the comfortable land of the expected to places it has seldom been. Writing through the detritus of Canada''s colonization and settlement, Rhodes'' writes poems to and with Canada''s original documents of finding and keeping. He writes a poem to each of the eleven numbered treaties (the Post Confederation Treaties between many of Canada''s First Nations and the Queen of England)--he writes to the fonts he finds in Treaty 5, the river he finds in Treaty 6, and the chemicals he finds in Treaty 8. Rhodes'' writes poems to and with the Indian Act.
Beyond the treaties, Rhodes writes form
