Hungry Sling Shots

"Since his first book, The Mood Embosser, was published in 2001, Louis Cabri has established himself as one of the most distinctive, and entertaining, poets in Canada. Steeped in the transformative poetics of the post-New American Poetry of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, Cabri has followed that impulse into a fresh terrain that is simultaneously familiar and disorientingly strange. Hungry Slingshots, Cabri's fourth book-length work, extends his explorations into language / sensibility / intelligibility, and into the sheer sound (and silence) of the line to produce a suite of poems that return a picquant critique of the excess that stands in for contemporary normality. Original, in the original sense of the word (i.e., returning to the earliest examples of something), Cabri's recent work opens up the resonating chambers of constraints imposed by poetry conventions -- most noticeably in the title sequence, "Hungry Sling Shots," which hearkens to the French 17th century civil war and the widespread use of the triolet form -- to make our oldest literary genre vibrate in new ways and in unexpectedly contemporary directions. Predominant in Cabri's approach to the page is his consciousness of poetry as