04/08/2025
It’s publication day for Jessi MacEachern’s truly breathtaking (and nearly breath-giving) sophomore collection of poetry Cut Side Down.
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“Could the Bard himself have come up with the amazing sonic description ‘snapping dirt-streaked asparagus’? Underpinning the collection is the sense that there is something both thrilling and deviant about putting these sounds and feelings into words: ‘Words / —sex, garments, death—turn to ash in the mouth. / But we thrill in the deceit!’”—Frances Grace Fyfe, Montreal Review of Books
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Cut Side Down feasts on books. Diving face-first into the bookcase, MacEachern calls up the pleasure and pain of influence in sumptuous, body-and-mind-bending poems. Here Virginia Woolf, Orlando, and companions attend salons hosted by Clark Coolidge and Renee Gladman, while Lorine Niedecker scolds Charles Olson in class. There are glimpses of the poet too—a lost boy in rural Prince Edward Island, a young woman in Montréal—as she concocts worlds and words. Immersed in a life of reading, and spying through the keyholes of fantasy, Cut Side Down melds lyric and conceptual experiment in a delightful banquet of autobiography, desire, invention, landscape and memory.
Jessi MacEachern born in Epekwitk/Prince Edward Island, currently lives in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal, where she teaches English literature. As a poet, professor, and scholar of contemporary feminist poetics, her critical and creative writing has appeared in journals and anthologies across Canada and around the world. Her debut poetry collection A Number of Stunning Attacks was published by Invisible Publishing in 2021.
