Common Place

By Sarah Pinder

Common Place explores the stories of shifting, resilient bodies and landscapes bound by systems of capital and power. From thin threads of text messages across borders to encounters with strangers in the crush of rush-hour transit, Sarah Pinder names our most private and public moments of seeing and being seen. With considered, quiet urgency, this poem witnesses our ambiguous, aching present and looks towards what comes next.

‘Watch for theplaces where Pinder goes for the imperative: like the book as a whole, these commands are generous, beautiful, and difficult lifelines thrown from a fellow survivor of the present.’

– Jennifer Nelson, author of Aim at the Centaur Stealing Your Wife

‘Common Place feels like the logbook of a survivor, one that shows how the intimate and the idiosyncratic persist within the post-capitalist technosphere. A tatteredrecord keeping, Common Place is friend of the abject landscape, “home of the lesser, lowercase subject. * Grasp its compassionate disposition, and this fragmentary poem reveals the affective centre of its ingeniously dissociative fabric.’

– Sue Sinclair, author of Heaven’s Thieves

• Language: English
• Publisher: Coach House Books
• Release date: Apr 24, 2017
• ISBN: 9781770565135

Sarah Pinder

Sarah Pinder is the author of the poetry collection Cutting Room. Her writing has been included in Geist, Arc, and Poetry is Dead, and others. She lives in Toronto.

Book preview

COMMON PLACE

Tumbling behind pleasure

on our best behaviour,

holding its hands.

The sweeter version:

hollow, ropey, and roaring,

in redux with the truest reds.

Step by step, man in a blue suit,

man with a baby, man kneading the grass,

carrying some matte black apparatus.

Digging the trough for a headstone,

a fleshy neutrality of debt, lymph-tinted.

You can’t pay back flicker –

we’re in marked space, using

our bottle caps to place

three-minute video calls home.

Kid on a gas-powered low-rider,

tearing up the middle of the potholed street,

arcs wide at the end of the block,

his unexpected giggling passing

a third time,

shooting into the pointillist pinks,

engine spluttering.

Barely a sidewalk,

barely a fence to walk through.

Yes, they are real.

No, we didn’t kill them,

but we did dip them in lacquer

to make them our own.

Yes, you have debts, and we’ve moved

beyond administrative whispers,

toward the ploughing under.

On the other side of time, spun up,

you will not remember

why she dragged

the bed into the yard,

lit it on fire.

Who can really remember?

The past is a mould.

Wrapped boxes eventually shrink.

Cables and bottles of urine move

into your car on the other side of time,

corroding slowly.

Pallets of remote control

monster trucks, antennae bowed.

Make a gift of your boxes of flatware,

sheers, appliances