Birding in the Glass Age of Isolation

By Curtis LeBlanc

Birding in the Glass Age of Isolation explores the experience and greater social implications of mental illness, specifically OCD and Hallucinogen Persisting Perception Disorder. It asks the questions: How does anxiety inform both how we act and how we interpret those actions afterwards? How does the fear of retribution from one’s own mind lead to miscalculations or total inaction? Finally, how is one’s self-worth effaced in the balancing act between trying to do the right thing and doing nothing at all?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nightwood Editions
• Release date: Apr 18, 2020
• ISBN: 9780889713697

Book preview

Curtis LeBlanc. Poems. Birding in the Glass Age of Isolation.

Birding in the Glass Age of Isolation

Curtis LeBlanc

Birding in the Glass Age of Isolation

Nightwood Editions logo 2020

Copyright © Curtis LeBlanc, 2020

all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior permission of the publisher or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from Access Copyright, the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency, www.accesscopyright.ca, [e-mail].

Nightwood Editions logo

Nightwood Editions

P.O. Box 1779

Gibsons, BC v0n 1v0

Canada

www.nightwoodeditions.com

cover photograph: Kathryn Prescott

cover design & typography: Carleton Wilson

Government of Canada wordmark Canada Council for the Arts logo Supported by the Province of British Columbia through the British Columbia Arts Council

Nightwood Editions acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada, and the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council.

This book has been produced on 100% post-consumer recycled, ancient-forest-free paper, processed chlorine-free and printed with vegetable-based dyes.

Printed and bound in Canada.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: Birding in the glass age of isolation / Curtis LeBlanc.

Names: LeBlanc, Curtis, author.

Description: Poems.

Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20190201177 | Canadiana (ebook) 20190201207 | ISBN 9780889713680 (softcover) | ISBN 9780889713697 (ebook)

Classification: LCC PS8623.E32775 B57 2020 | DDC C811/.6—dc23

for Mallory

Table of Contents

Part One

Frankenfish 15

On Seeing My Father in Bruegel’s Winter Landscape with Skaters and a Bird Trap 16

Birding in the Glass Age of Isolation 18

Filmography of My Eighteenth Year 21

A Restaurant in California 22

Slave Lake Epithalamium 24

Stubborn Properties 25

Design Stage Failure Analysis 26

Unforgiving Air, Arundel, Quebec 28

Fair Oaks Summer 30

Poplars 31

My Brother, Free Willy, Paris 2013 32

Don’t Swing 33

Wild Blueberry Pie 34

At the End of the Fiscal Year 36

Axe Head 38

Part Two

Micropsia 45

Macropsia 46

Depersonalization 47

Derealization 48

Floaters 49

False Perceptions of Movement 50

Visual