A Doctor Pedalled Her Bicycle Over The River Arno

A Doctor Pedalled Her Bicycle Over the River Arno carries within it all the technique, vision, imaginative labour, and razor-sharp precision of Matt Rader’s first two collections, Living Things and Miraculous Hours. But it also ascends to a new and luminous, demanding, particularized realm of the human. Wildflowers and weeds, newspaper archives and illness, hostels and hostiles, parenting and the shadowy history of grandparents, war and Renaissance paintings: Matt Rader’s unassuming, deeply spirited, and expansive poems show us again how contemporary lyric can go such a long way toward revealing our true homes to us at the moment we find ourselves most nakedly un-housed. Rader seeks out limits, borders, and frontiers -- those mapped for us by authority, and the concomitant, interior shadowlines we ourselves draw -- in order to test their validity. If Borges had imagined an atlas of our layered identities, it might look like these poems. This is an astounding collection from a thrilling voice in poetry.

Composed over a period of profound illness, Visual Inspection is a searching reflection on poetry, power and our embodied lives. Shaped by matching elements of literary history, poetic practice, contemporary art, politics and ecology with Rader’s own experience of chronic illness and pain, Visual Inspection writes into and through what is accessible to our minds and bodies. Part memoir, part essay, part poetic investigation, the text guides us through kaleidoscopic meditations on disability, access, vision, redaction, pain, illness and death. Set primarily in the central Okanagan, Visual Inspection is a codex of references, artifacts and associations that, taken as whole, revisions access as process and art as experience.

What I Want to Tell Goes Like This is an intensely original first short story collection from acclaimed poet Matt Rader. The last story, "All This Was a Long Time Ago," is the 2014 winner of the Jack Hodgins Founders' Award for fiction from The Malahat Review, and other offerings from the collection have appeared in Event, The New Quarterly, Grain, Joyland, Forget Magazine and the Rusty Toque. Rader's command of tension is masterful in these dark, off-kilter stories that are largely set in the context of the working/labour class in and around the Comox Valley on Vancouver Island, BC. They alternate between exploring the history of severe labour struggles in the area over a century ago, and the present-day experiences of people sliding through transitional, ambiguous moments in their relationships and sexuality. The juxtaposition of the two time periods seems to hint at the echoes of the harsh, violent legacy of the earlier age and its power struggles that continue to resonate in contemporary life. In What I Want to Tell Goes Like This, we are witness to the controversial shooting death of infamous union activist Albert "Ginger" Goodwin by a police constable in 1918; to the squalor of tent cities erected on the Royston Bay mudflats during the Great Vancouver Coal Strike of 1912-14; to two boys’ experimentation with sexual violence at the end of a secluded logging road; and to clarity and companionship found in a small cabin by the sea as a son cares for his dying father—a rough man who abandoned him when he was eight. In Rader's artful tales of grit and mystery, danger never feels far away.

A luminous new collection of poems about entering middle age, living a life of books, and trying to know what it means to be or not be from or of a place. If pattern is information, and verse the mind's conversation with Time, Matt Rader's Desecrations animates a theatre of silence we recognize as mystery. Building on an already astonishing body of work, in lines so fluid and uncannily resonant they feel cousined to the dream world, Rader insists that intimate moments bear the cargo of both past and future, antiquity and grim projection, ancestry and unborn selves, resulting in poems of kaleidoscopic beauty and strangeness. These singular, musical evocations eschew argument in favour of a welcoming, arms-wide abandon, and an ethics of porousness and connection. By some alchemy of voice, detail, collision, and disobedience to chronology, Desecrations reveals the imagination as a worthy location of real experience. These poems are a new way to orbit around a locus of damage, a new fabric of signs and singing that we can't help but realize we'd been yearning for all along.

What I Want to Tell Goes Like This is an intensely original first short story collection from acclaimed poet Matt Rader. The last story, "All This Was a Long Time Ago," is the 2014 winner of the Jack Hodgins Founders' Award for fiction from The Malahat Review, and other offerings from the collection have appeared in Event, The New Quarterly, Grain, Joyland, Forget Magazine and the Rusty Toque. Rader's command of tension is masterful in these dark, off-kilter stories that are largely set in the context of the working/labour class in and around the Comox Valley on Vancouver Island, BC. They alternate between exploring the history of severe labour struggles in the area over a century ago, and the present-day experiences of people sliding through transitional, ambiguous moments in their relationships and sexuality. The juxtaposition of the two time periods seems to hint at the echoes of the harsh, violent legacy of the earlier age and its power struggles that continue to resonate in contemporary life. In What I Want to Tell Goes Like This, we are witness to the controversial shooting death of infamous union activist Albert "Ginger" Goodwin by a police constable in 1918; to the squalor of tent cities erected on the Royston Bay mudflats during the Great Vancouver Coal Strike of 1912-14; to two boys' experimentation with sexual violence at the end of a secluded logging road; and to clarity and companionship found in a small cabin by the sea as a son cares for his dying father--a rough man who abandoned him when he was eight. In Rader's artful tales of grit and mystery, danger never feels far away.

Written in the year after the birth of Rader's first daughter, "Living Things" honestly introduces the contradictions of the modern world and brings subtle slowness to a chaotic, fast-paced environment. It is both celebration and documentation of this world and its relationship to all living things.

NOMINATED FOR THE 2006 GERALD LAMPERT MEMORIAL AWARD Matt Rader's debut collection is the fierce and tender retelling of our first "miraculous hours"--those early significant-and-strange interactions with the ones we love and the world we live in. From a world where wild dogs slide like ghosts into homes, water towers are "giant blue bullets unexploded in the earth" and walls are tortured to talk, Matt Rader forms a meticulously crafted reflection on how the events, experiences and environment of our early lives shape our sense of faith, our strongest convictions, and the map of the world we carry with us.