For April we’re excited to be reading Sunny Ways by ryan fitzpatrick. An off-beat examination of the denials that underpin extractive capitalism. From the cratered lake of Chennai, India to the environmental racism of Neon Genesis Evangelion’s Tokyo-3, Sunny Ways oscillates between images of environmental collapse and resistance. Standing waist deep in the massive tailing ponds of Alberta’s Tar Sands, Sunny Ways wades through the tangled complicities of climate catastrophe. In the process, the book grapples with the failure of political hope and the intransigence of climate change denialism. Fitzpatrick channels his experiences growing up in the big sky economic pragmatism of Calgary, where oil pays the rent and puts food on the table, into an essayistic pair of long poems that echo the ecological poetics of writers like Rita Wong, Stephen Collis, and Juliana Spahr.
ryan fitzpatrick is the publisher of the online-based and poetry-focused Model Press. He was on the editorial collective of filling Station magazine and helped found the Flywheel Reading Series. He is the author of four books of poetry and over a dozen chapbooks including Sunny Ways (Invisible, 2023), Coast Mountain Foot (Talonbooks, 2021), Fortified Castles (Talonbooks, 2014), and Fake Math (Snare/Invisible, 2007). A former resident of Calgary and Vancouver, ryan now lives in Toronto. You can find him at ryanfitzpatrick.ca.
Twitter: @ryanfitzpublic
Instagram: @ryanfitzpublic