Dead Salmon Dialectics

Drawing on scientific studies of salmon recycling in perhumid rainforests, this book follows the dark and often humorous trial of a young biologist at work in the wildest estuaries of the rainiest place on earth. Written for the twenty-fifth anniversary of the historic Lyell Island logging blockades on Xaaydaa Gwaay, these poems form a musicolous bricolage out of a mesothermal wordstream, sampling ideas of unequal value toward a cohesion of ecological and ecoliterary integrity. Filled with thousands of rotting carcasses, rain, swirls of phosphorescent algae, rain, night-fishing bears, local sledneck debutantes, the marvel of raven song, rain and near misses by giant falling trees, this is an interdisciplinary experiment for the senses and the synapses. While they challenge passive readers to activate and participate, the poems set the visceral beauty of coastal rainforest music to the unavoidable slippery realities of hard science, technology and philosophy.