Rooted in the back alleys, squats and psychiatric wards of contemporary Vancouver and Montreal, these unyielding poems enter the intersecting tensions and intensities in characters such as Mike, a panhandler on Vancouver’s Commercial Drive, Matthew, a runaway punk, and Dara, a single mother. Cusp’s central sequence, however, concerns the tragic life and death of Frank Bonneville, a schizophrenic and drug-addicted artist who became Ms. Owen’s muse between their 2001 meeting and his 2003 suicide. Complemented by Karen Moe’s haunting photographs of Vancouver’s neglected spaces and rejected objects, Cusp/detritus is a testimony to an obsession with the lost.
