Twitch Force
2019
First Published
3.56
Average Rating
112
Number of Pages
A muscle’s “twitch force” is a measurement of its energy potential. It’s history you can forget it, but it’s engraved on you where you can’t see it, and all it wants to do is repeat. Scotiabank Giller Prize winner Michael Redhill’s first collection of poetry in eighteen years, Twitch Force has a gnomic, satirical, and lucid intelligence. In “Ingredients,” heredity’s recipe is told via short-form family narrative; in “My Arrangements,” a stolen laptop battery leads to an encounter with the Israeli Olympic women’s beach volleyball team; while in “The Women,” human beauty is parsed down to the level of “I’m beautiful; I have my mother’s feet. The women who change into men are beautiful men who were once beautiful women.” This is poetry concerned with love and its loss, despair and hard-won hope, knowledge and essential mystery, aging and timelessness. Readers are ideas that present as self-explanatory may be closer than they appear. Twitch Force is a stunningly realized return to the form from one of Canada’s bravest and most original poets.
Avg Rating
3.56
Number of Ratings
25
5 STARS
32%
4 STARS
24%
3 STARS
20%
2 STARS
16%
1 STARS
8%
goodreads
Author
Michael Redhill
Author · 9 books
Aka Inger Ash Wolfe. Michael Redhill is an American-born Canadian poet, playwright and novelist. Born in Baltimore, Maryland, Redhill was raised in the metropolitan Toronto, Ontario area. He pursued one year of study at Indiana University, and then returned to Canada, completing his education at York University and the University of Toronto. He was on the editorial board of Coach House Press from 1993 to 1996, and is currently the publisher and editor of the Canadian literary magazine Brick. His play, Building Jerusalem, depicts a meeting between Karl Pearson, Augusta Stowe-Gullen, Adelaide Hoodless, and Silas Tertius Rand on New Year's Eve night just prior to the 20th century.
