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Garments of the Known
By Norm Sacuta
AVAILABLE
0-88971-178-X
Nightwood Editions
5.75 x 8.5
· 80 pages
Paperback
· $16.95
October 2001
"There is no truth, and you have set it between you;
you have been unwise enough to make it a formula;
you have dressed the unknowable in the garments of the known."
-Djuna Barnes
"Whether writing about life in Alberta’s queer rose country or the homoerotic possibilities to be found in the land sculptures of ancient Britain, Norm Sacuta imbues his clean-cut lines with pathos, skill and intelligence. His is a poetry of the agonies at the margins writ large against the overwhelming, sometimes oppressive centrality of ‘mainstream’ experience, which he feels drawn to through the literary canon, popular culture and, of course, the family. Sacuta writes with anger, longing, and love from a position of honesty that is the signature of this new voice." -John Barton, author of Hyphothesis
"Sacuta's sureness of perception and clarity of voice make the insights of these poems so seductively accessible. And what is truly captivating - what makes you come back to them - is the way the vividness of lived moments are haunted by something more. So many poems are written from moments of insightful loneliness, bearing witness to the past and to the dead, and his erotic encounters are inseparably about sex, wonderment and loss. Sacuta is profoundly readable." -Jonathan Dollimore, author of Death, Desire and Loss in Western Culture
"Gently and somehwt wistfully, Garments of the Known, the debut collection by Edmonton writer Norm Sacuta, reaches for an awareness of the costume gender. The poems, with their muscular, Anglo-Saxon language, closely observe the everyday world of the masculine, its bewildering contradictions and secrecy. . . life interesting ideas are lain down with disarming simplicity and honesty. . ." -Miranda Pearson, Arc
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