Poetry

Unbecoming
Neil Surkan

Poems that embrace the disorder of transformation.

Subtler, subtler, beat our hearts / down aisles of cluttered glitz.

Poetry

Unbecoming, Neil Surkan’s sophomore collection, clings to hope while the world deteriorates, transforms, and grows less hospitable from moment to moment. Interplaying tenderness with dogged perseverance, these poems tumble through vignettes of degraded landscapes, ebbing spiritual communities, faltering men, and precarious friendships.

Yet, in the face of such despair, responsibility and optimism bolster one another – exuberance, amazement, and compassion persist despite the worsening of the wounded Earth. Multifaceted and inventive, this collection of poems vaults from intimation to excoriation, where grief, desire, bewilderment, and protest all crackle and meld.

As the world “appears, exceeds, and un- / becomes too quickly for certainty, / just enough for love,” the poems in Unbecoming face the horizon with wary eyes and refuse to turn away.

Neil Surkan is the author of the poetry collection On High and the chapbooks Their Queer Tenderness and Super, Natural. He lives in Calgary.

The Hugh MacLennan Poetry Series