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.
