Fine by Matt Rader

A poetry collection that looks to the future

Image | Fine by Matt Rader

Caption: (Nightwood Editions)

The follow-up to Ghosthawk, Fine is set largely in the Kelowna area of the Okanagan Valley, BC, over the period of June 2021–June 2022. The poems address the extraordinary natural, historical and social events of that period including the June 2021 heat dome and the November 2021 atmospheric river, the ongoing pandemic and resulting social anomie, the public announcement of hundreds of unmarked residential school graves across the country, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. On a personal level, the poems grapple with questions of disability, illness, trans identity, healing and what a good future might look like. Written in a speculative mood, the poems in Fine look back on the contemporary moment with its terrors and mythopoetic digital scrim from an imagined future, so that the voice itself becomes an incantation, a summoning of a world of survivance and beauty. (Nightwood Editions)
Rader is a writer from Kelowna, B.C. He is the author of six volumes of poetry, a book of nonfiction and the short story collection What I Want to Tell Goes Like This. He teaches creative writing at the University of British Columbia Okanagan.