CBC BOOKS CANADIAN POETRY COLLECTIONS TO WATCH FOR IN SPRING 2023

Feminist poems both serious and absurd that question our obsession with productivity instead of with care.

Continuity Errors questions the privileging of work and productivity over rest and care from an ecological and feminist perspective. Written before and immediately after the birth of her first child, these poems try to imagine the future her son will inherit. Encounters with an unusual cast of characters – including lonely cryptids, unrepentant grifters, and persistent ghosts – provide incomplete answers, and while the continuity errors keep multiplying around her, Wright pauses to consider whether our devotion to innovation is keeping us stuck.

"Catriona Wright's Continuity Errors is a book of snaking moves and sneaking intellect, a book of style and fortitude and sass. Wright's always sharp and often eerie interrogations lead us through a world of cryptocurrency, grunt work, predictive policing, extinction, haute cuisine, billboard ads, smoke breaks, breast pumps; these are poems for our moment of onslaught and bewilderment that, having had the world forced down their throats, spit back." – Natalie Shapero, author of Popular Longing

Catriona Wright's profile page

Catriona Wright is the author of the poetry collection Table Manners and the short story collection Difficult People. Her poems have appeared in the American Poetry Review, the Walrus, and Magma, and they have been anthologized in The Next Wave: An Anthology of 21st Century Canadian Poetry and in Best Canadian Poetry 2015 and 2018.

"These feminist poems include the serious and the absurd and interrogate our collective obsession with productivity and work instead of with care. Wright’s lyric, prose, and persona poems are all located within the domestic sphere of childbirth and child care, using different voices to explore these issues." – Cassandra Drudi, Quill & Quire '2023 Spring Poetry Preview'

"Capitalism, climate change, feminism and the gender binary — Catriona Wright’s Continuity Errors responds to these topics with dry humour and a vivid parade of aliens, robots, fae, and more though is still incredibly serious in its message." – Shaylyn Schwieg, CAROUSEL Magazine

"Continuity Errors by Catriona Wright is excellent! I found the writing to be entrancing, truthful, and transformational." – Emma Sikora, Porter Square Books

"Like a post-industrial feminist Rodney Dangerfield, the speaker in the poems of Continuity Errors can’t get no respect." – David Starkey, '31 Outstanding Poetry Books from 2023,' The California Review of Books

"The super real, feminist, and sharp-edged poems of Catriona Wright’s Continuity Errors are at turns an 'embodied presence / in virtual environments,' a 'fever / dream of escape,' a 'walk through the cemetery,' and 'a scathing assessment' of our time.'– Jami Macarty, NewPages.com