The epigraph to the first section is from “The Auroras of Autumn” by Wallace Stevens (The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, Vintage Books, 1990).
The italicized lines in “Essentialist” are from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay Nominalist and Realist. From emersoncentral.com.
The epigraph to the second section is from the story “Chance” by Alice Munro (Runaway, Penguin Canada, 2004).
“Miles of Europe went by, and then it was dark”: The title is a sentence from the story “The Road to Santiago de Compostela” by André Alexis (Despair, and Other Stories of Ottawa, McClelland and Stewart, 1998).
The epigraph to the third section is from Anton Chekhov: A Life in Letters (Penguin Classics, 2004).
“The World’s Hub”: I’m entirely indebted to Martin Bennett’s beautiful translation from the Italian as published in The Faber Book of 20th Century Italian Poems edited by Jamie McKendrick (Faber and Faber, 2004). My transplanted version also contains lyrics by Joel Gibb of The Hidden Cameras—possibly misheard.
The italicized lines in “A Berth in The Stern” are from Martin Amis’s short story “Heavy Water” (Heavy Water, Vintage Canada, 2000).
The epigraph to the fourth section is from “The Flotilla” by Glyn Maxwell (The Breakage, Faber and Faber, 1998).
“On Utility”: My intention was to translate the Canadian artist Germaine Koh’s approach or methodology for the making of her art (insofar as I understood it) into a generative strategy for poetry. Subsequently, her own works take on the same role here as the materials of the world seem to do in her installations. The interested reader and / or art lover should visit www.germainkoh.com.