ryan fitzpatrick

No Depression in Heaven asks how we respond to bad times. Written during country music's most recent ascent in popularity, this poetry "LP" consists of ten "tracks" that each take up a rhythm, only to bend it out of shape. Dwelling on whether it is best to look backward to a seemingly better past, longing for a way to make things great again, or to stare into the abyss of the future, gambling that entry into heaven will finally provide release from a weary life, No Depression in Heaven rejects both of these dangerous horizons. It chooses instead to remain resolutely in present uncertainty, addressing our latter-day anxiety through poetic improvisation, treating the text as a space of play and experimentation. Drawing inspiration from a variety of sources, both musical and poetic - and taking its title from a famous Carter Family song - No Depression in Heaven asks what it means to hold onto something toxic because of the comforts it affords, to daydream about days long past rather than gripping the reins of the present. This is a book that pulls on its boots, tilts its hat, and brushes the dust off its Nudie suit before tipping language out of key.

An off-beat examination of the denials that underpin extractive capitalism. From the cratered lake of Chennai, India to the environmental racism of Neon Genesis Evangelion’s Tokyo-3, Sunny Ways oscillates between images of environmental collapse and resistance. Standing waist deep in the massive tailing ponds of Alberta’s Tar Sands, Sunny Ways wades through the tangled complicities of climate catastrophe. In the process, the book grapples with the failure of political hope and the intransigence of climate change denialism. Fitzpatrick channels his experiences growing up in the big sky economic pragmatism of Calgary, where oil pays the rent and puts food on the table, into an essayistic pair of long poems that echo the ecological poetics of writers like Rita Wong, Stephen Collis, and Juliana Spahr.

Starting with lyric statement as a point of interrogation, Fortified Castles asks what might cause retreat into the comforting walls of the self. North American culture is saturated with discourses of self-improvement and self-awareness at the same time it is full of anxiety over the things that separate us. Moving from a stock-ticker tableau of economic and environmental crisis to the difficulty of finding one another in the streets, the poems in Fortified Castles stage impasse after impasse, locating the Western subject between the ramparts it walks and the barricades it throws up. Composed in three sections, Fortified Castles constructs a complex web of interpersonal disconnection from the anonymous detritus of our self-obsessed neoliberal moment. Written contemporaneously with the 2008 economic crisis, the first section, "21st Century Monsters," imagines a number of world-ending scenarios from the collapse of the environment to the collapse of capitalism to the collapse of culture, forming a questioning and questionable primer on the things that terrify us. The second section, "Fortified Castles," heavily recombines found material in a lengthy serial collage composed of multiplied and impersonal personal statements that add up in unanticipated ways, cascading in knee-jerk patterns of anxious hand-wringing and stubborn unreasonableness. Written during the 2011 Occupy protests, the final section, "Friendship Is Magic," positions the hopeful connections of that moment beside the privilege rippling through it, interrogating the very real tension between working collectively and living comfortably.