Bloom is the electrifying debut collection from one of our best emerging poets. If a studio technician could “remix” poems by modern and contemporary poets so they retold the story of the Manhattan Project from the viewpoint of Louis Slotin, simultaneously putting Robert Lowell in whispered conversation with Ted Hughes, as vocalized by a Canadian physicist from Winnipeg, over the current state of literary utopian projects, we’d hear something nearly as captivating as Michael Lista’s Bloom. As it is, we also get “Lista” swimming ghostlike through this palimpsest-narrative, inhabiting Slotin and brashly “tickling the dragon’s tail” at the nucleus of untested notions of creation, stasis, and destruction. In Bloom, one of the most dangerous historical fulcrums of the last century is somehow made viscerally present again, and, more wondrously, made to radiate outward into very current crises.

Michael Lista is a nationally acclaimed poet, editor, and literary critic. He is the author of two collections of poetry: Strike Anywhere (Porcupine’s Quill, 2016), Bloom (House of Anansi, 2010) and The Scarborough (Signal Editions, 2014). He served as poetry editor of The Walrus and wrote the popular column On Poetry for the National Post. Lista currently acts as co-editor of Partisan Magazine. He lives in Toronto