Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Old Hat

Old Hat

Winger, Rob

Paperback

General Poetry

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 0889712964
ISBN13: 9780889712966
Publisher: Nightwood Editions
Published: Apr 12 2014
Pages: 96
Weight: 0.30
Height: 0.30 Width: 5.50 Depth: 7.90
Language: English

Old Hat is the third book of poetry and first collection of occasional poems by the author of the 2007 Globe 100 book, Muybridge's Horse: Governor General and Trillium Awards nominee, Rob Winger. Driven by an attempt to understand how to reorder common experience, the book's transitional sections - Set, Re/Set, and Lect - all intertwine and overlap, thematically and intuitively linked by the extensive range and depth of Winger's poetics.

While each section is discrete, each is also in harmony with its neighbours. The Re/set sections revive clichés of Canadian lyricism--landscape and maple syrup, Icarus falling and human-rights rhetoric, war and ancestral migration, death, love, and disease--not only to critique but also to validate the experiential urgency of poetic reflection, while the Set sections harness Winger's vernacular voice in a
struggle for self-definition against powerfully pedestrian political and economic systems. They signed Yu Darvish without seeing his fork, Winger writes in one poem. They signed their books without looking up at us./ They gave you fries with that without even asking. Such a balance of agency and inaction is also central in Old Hat's final section, Lect, a simmering simulation of grad-school jargon, sailor slang, plumbing terminology, and GPS directives that exposes the limitations of esoteric linguistic ontologies by moving from general observations to those of increasingly expert understanding.

While rich with advice to Keep your personal longings with you at all times, Old Hat is also generous, incisive, boisterous, and funny, a book about place, but also about understanding and situation. Spoken through clichés, vernacular, and jargon, Old Hat is just as familiar as it is odd, just as comforting as disquieting, an exceptional meditation on what it means to think about writing.

Also in

General Poetry

View All