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    ISBN: 9781772011326 | Paperback

    144 pages | Pub. Date: 20170328
    5.5 W × 8.5 H × 1 D inches
    Backlist | Poetry | Bisac: POE011000
    Rights: WORLD

    Or find Inspecting Nostalgia in your local bookstore

Taking its title from a phrase in a pop-up ad, Inspecting Nostalgia is R. Kolewe’s second collection of poetry that brings together found text and fragments of various writers’ work with scraps from his own journals.

Kolewe’s concerns with “nostalgia,” derived from the Greek “nostos” (return) and “algos” (pain), forge poems that are charged with an intense yearning for that which has been lost. Heartbreak is tempered with Jacques Derrida’s essay on Immanuel Kant to create almost-sonnets and many tercets, and marginal notes brim with desire and memory to test the limits of the age-old matter of the lyric poem.

These poems have their multiplicity fixed on a certain trait that makes us human: an attachment to the past. By piecing together texts from disparate sources, they capture the kaleidoscopic influence of other voices without incongruity or disorientation. Kolewe perches on the threshold of the lyric and conceptual to allow the melody and jangle of influence to rest within us as we read, only to leave us changed and wanting as we try to catch up to the rhythm of the present.

Inspecting Nostalgia has all the lucent warmth and sting of heartbreak – roses, stars, and decay abound – subdued by a compositional technique that pilfers and forages the analytical and prosaic to create a cohesive
work that is often elegiac and always evocative.

By R. Kolewe

R. Kolewe was born in Montreal and lives in Toronto. Educated in physics and engineering at the University of Toronto, he pursued a successful career in the software industry for many years. He now lives in Toronto and writes full time. His work has appeared in various online and print magazines, and he has published four collections of poetry, A Net of Momentary Sapphire (Talonbooks, 2023), The Absence of Zero (Book*hug, 2021), Inspecting Nostalgia (Talonbooks, 2017), and Afterletters (Book*hug, 2014) as well as several chapbooks.

Read more about R. Kolewe


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