Jan Conn: 5 books

"Every drawer in every chest overflows with illogic and passion." "Do we want love each and every day of our lives?" Jan Conn asks in a poem called Michoac'n. "You bet your ass," she answers. The poems of Botero's Beautiful Horses are charged with otherness, bright with...

Imaginarium 3: The Best Canadian Speculative Writing is a reprint anthology collecting speculative short fiction and poetry (science fiction, fantasy, horror, magic realism, etc.) that represents the best work published by Canadian writers in the 2013 calendar year. Featuring Colleen Anderson,...

Reading Edge Effects, Jan Conn’s masterful eighth collection, is a little like looking at Edward Burtynsky’s photographs of real industrial wastelands; both visions are as gorgeous as they are terrifying, platforms for thought, even for activism, depending as they do on the energy of the viewer/reader for completion.

Jaguar Rain is a rare text: at once a book of stand-alone poems and a work of scholarship, with textual notes and bibliography. Written in the voice of Margaret Mee (naturalist, explorer, and painter of flowers in the Amazon between 1956 and 1988), the poems are infused with wonder at a discovered...

“Do we want love / each and every day of our lives?” Jan Conn asks in a poem called “Michoacán.” “You bet your ass,” she answers. The poems of Botero’s Beautiful Horses are charged with otherness, bright with the exhilaration and danger of transformation. Many are descriptions of surrealist...