"Here is a book of luminous encounters, contradictions, collisions, interruptions, and meditations on art, nature, justice, historical memory, and territorial occupation. Brownes texts mine the harrowing destinies, and densities, of place, in this case, of the Northwest Coast of North America. This new work - in seven movements - is tuned to the autobiographical, alert to rhythm and improvisation, and immersed in a torrent of memory and tenderness. Here is a book for the ear. At its heart is the enigma of family. A central premise is that events are contiguous through time and space, and that ancestral experiences live on in the body physically, invisibly, mapping the present with stored-up longing and striving. The structure of the book conforms loosely to the chronological order in which the texts were composed, constituting a variation on a poets daybook, a record of intersections, correspondences, and juxtapositions. The books compositional model is borrowed from jazz improvisation; by locating a rhythm or a melodic line, and opening the field to associations, visions, rhymes, chance, interruption, and, one may wish, grace, the texts begin to summon and assemble themselves.

"Art does not render the visible, but renders visible," said Paul Klee. Why are we aching so? Where are the words and melodies that will heal us? Here is also a book of voices, its pages infused with the eros of intertextuality. Apollinaires spirit presides overall. Among those overheard are Marjorie Acland, Antonin Artaud, André Breton, Robert Burton, Louis Clexlixqen, Henry Edenshaw, Frantz Fanon, Allan King, Chief Joseph, Gwendolyn McEwen, Charles Olson, Pablo Picasso, Dorothy Jean Ray, Raymond Roussel, Victor Serge, Gertrude Stein, Henry Thoreau, Primrose Upton, Walt Whitman, and the Surrealist artists Kurt Seligmann and Wolfgang Paalen, both of whom visited the NW Coast in the late 1930s. Included are translations of three early Modernist poems by Apollinaire, Blaise Cendrars, and Marcel Thiry, each of which cites Vancouver, which in the early decades of the 20th century captured the imagination of Parisian artists and poets. "Petal" reproduces the text for Alfredo Santa Anas ravishing composition for string quartet, soprano, and voice, performed at the Vancouver East Cultural Centre in May 2018 as the conclusion to Music for a Night in May. "--.