Garments of the Known

"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

With its juxtaposition of Canadian prairie with the downs of southern England, with its movement between reality and dream, night and day, Norm Sacuta''s brilliant debut poetry collection, Garments of the Known, uses both traditional verse forms and linguistic fracture to create a most passionate landscape.

That landscape is always half one world, half another. As a gay man in Alberta, Sacuta''s verse lends a wary eye to the political and the dangerous, even as it articulately pokes fun at the whole notion of a gay identity and the imagery needed to express it. He has also lived and studied in England, and that experience mirrors the struggle between tradition and experimentation in his verse, and a voice caught between a sense of familial belonging and cultural expatriation.

Garments of the Known marks the arrival of a powerful, original new voice in Canadian poetry, a voice that will continue to be heard from in years to come.