Michael Trussler

ISBN 9781771262743

$18.00 CDN/USA  94 pages

In Rare Sighting of a Guillotine on the Savannah, Michael Trussler engages with the beauty and violence manifested in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The poems here blur online reality with Zen Buddhism (relating the Japanese female anthropomorph Hatsune Miku to Basho), and explore humanity’s changing relationship with “Nature” to gain a deeper understanding of language and technology. With thematic subtext pertaining to mental illness and aging, much of Rare Sighting of a Guillotine on the Savannah offers the sense that this subjective experience parallels the way our species has sabotaged itself. If these poems contain much grief, they also rejoice in the simplicity of light, the colours painters show, and the intricacy of what remains of the natural world.

Michael Trussler writes poetry, short stories, and creative non-fiction. He is also a photographer. He’s published various books, most recently Melancholy Girl with Sitar (The Alfred Gustav Press, 2020). His prize-winning work has appeared in domestic and international anthologies and journals. His collection of short stories, Encounters, won the Book of the Year and City of Regina Awards from the Saskatchewan Book Awards in 2006. Accidental Animals, a poetry collection, was short-listed for the same awards in 2007. He teaches English at the University of Regina.