Twitch Force: Poems - Softcover

A muscle’s “twitch force” is a measurement of its energy potential. It’s history dependent: you can forget it, but like so much else, it’s engraved on you where you can’t see it, and all it wants to do is repeat. Scotiabank Giller Prize winner Michael Redhill’s first collection of poetry in nineteen years, Twitch Force is grounded in its title as an essential source of its gnomic, satirical, and lucid intelligence. In “Ingredients,” heredity’s recipe is told via short form family narrative; in “My Arrangements,” a stolen laptop battery leads to an encounter with the Israeli Olympic women’s beach volleyball team; while in “The Women,” human beauty is parsed down to the level of chromosomes: “I’m beautiful; I have my mother’s feet. The women who change into men are beautiful men who were once beautiful women.”

This is poetry concerned with love and its loss, despair and hard-won hope, knowledge and essential ignorance, aging and timelessness. Readers are cautioned: things that present as self-explanatory may be closer than they appear. Twitch Force is a stunningly realized return to the form from one of Canada’s bravest and most original lyric poets.

MICHAEL REDHILL is the author of five collections of poetry, the most recent of which is Light-crossing (2001, House of Anansi Press), and seven novels, some of which were written under the pseudonym Inger Ash Wolfe. His 2006 novel, Consolation, reimagined Toronto's mid-nineteenth century and was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. His most recent novel, Bellevue Square, won the 2017 Scotiabank Giller Prize. He edited and published Brick: A Literary Journal from 1998 to 2007, and continues to teach as well as edit. He lives in Toronto and has two sons.