We were blown away by our 2019 poetry releases, and this spring we have two new additions to add to Goose Lane’s poetry list: In the Vicinity of Riches and Everyone at This Party.

A nostalgia for modernist disjuncture, a yearning for symbolist depth, and everywhere a fondness for surfaces which, ironically, coax the reader to peel back the stylish veneer. This is Chris Hutchinson’s poetry book: In the Vicinity of Riches.

Hutchinson's new collection of poems scrolls through myriad moods and aesthetic guises, by turns hallucinatory, despondent, and serene. Political and personal boundaries blur as do the categorical divisions between content and form. His poetry takes readers from the past to the present, and even offers a troubling look into what the future may hold. Imagine an architecture of breezeways, a freeway of exit ramps, a literature of repurposed literary conventions, the past "re-presented" in endless waves of arrival.

Hutchinson’s poetry explores the processes by which we might sometimes find, even in the midst of loss, the value of our lives beyond the spheres of war, toxic rhetoric, and neo-liberal commerce.

Unsentimental and blunt, but ultimately forgiving, Everyone at This Party scans the suburbs and tries to make sense of our private selves.

In Tanja Bartel’s debut, the pleasant and peaceful Vancouver suburbs clash with the interpersonal. The reader is exposed to the lives of people whose day-to-day is anything but peaceful, altered by luck and choice, fear and failure. In poems that light upon themes such as regret, guilt, and human empathy, Bartel highlights the arbitrary nature of life and the demons that persist within.