April is National Poetry Month, and to mark the occasion we'll be sharing some of our favourite poems from collections we've published over the years. Today's poem is "El Bruc, Spain (2018)" by Chris Hutchinson from the collection In the Vicinity of Riches.

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Author Chris Hutchinson has started his own virtual book tour! Check it out below.

"El Bruc, Spain (2018)"
by Chris Hutchinson

When you cannot go further
It is time to go back and wrest
Out of failure some
Thing shining.
      — David Schubert, “No Finis”

Noon. The white cat casts no shadow.

And neither does your poem, unless I count

the fossilized flames sealed inside of thin cloth-

covered books. Again, my dream to translate

the aerial syntax of cloud-coloured moths

proves false. As if Nuestra Señora de Montserrat

picking wild fennel beneath a red clay cliff were something

I’d actually seen and not merely pretended to have

spontaneously imagined. But your poem is not a passport

(stamped with exotic conceits) and I am half-sick

of peripheral revisions, images that play at suffering

for the sake of art. Meanwhile, having slipped the border

between words and worlds, you’ve already been

everywhere I go, traced in air

the form and moving of your departure.

Grab your own copy of In the Vicinity of Riches by Chris Hutchinson here, see more of Chris's virtual book tour here, or check out the rest of our poetry collection here.