Continuity Errors
CBC BOOKS CANADIAN POETRY COLLECTIONS TO WATCH FOR IN SPRING 2023
Feminist poems both serious and absurd that question our obsession with productivity instead of with care.
Continuity Errors questions the privileging of work and productivity over rest and care from an ecological and feminist perspective. Written before and immediately after the birth of her first child, these poems try to imagine the future her son will inherit. Encounters with an unusual cast of characters – including lonely cryptids, unrepentant grifters, and persistent ghosts – provide incomplete answers, and while the continuity errors keep multiplying around her, Wright pauses to consider whether our devotion to innovation is keeping us stuck.
"Catriona Wright's Continuity Errors is a book of snaking moves and sneaking intellect, a book of style and fortitude and sass. Wright's always sharp and often eerie interrogations lead us through a world of cryptocurrency, grunt work, predictive policing, extinction, haute cuisine, billboard ads, smoke breaks, breast pumps; these are poems for our moment of onslaught and bewilderment that, having had the world forced down their throats, spit back." – Natalie Shapero, author of Popular Longing
Catriona Wright is the author of the poetry collection Table Manners (Véhicule Press, 2017) and the short story collection Difficult People (Nightwood Editions, 2018). Her short stories have appeared in Geist, Joyland, Grain, The New Quarterly, and Room. Her poems have appeared in Prism International, Prairie Fire, Fiddlehead, and Lemon Hound, and they have been anthologized in The Next Wave: An Anthology of 21st Century Canadian Poetry and in The Best Canadian Poetry 2015 and 2018. She is the poetry editor for The Puritan and a co-founder of Desert Pets Press.