Cityscapes in Mating Season

Cityscapes in Mating Season combines a lyric sensibility with a distrust of any such singular vision, a loneliness coupled with desire to feel into the thrumming ground of a place, and a willingness to register beauty even at its most apocalyptic. Whether playful, sensual, or unsettling, the poems in this collection are always tightly crafted, attuned to languages possibilities as well as its limitations, its pitch and roll. From protest-filled Montreal to Vancouver's property disputes, the works in Cityscapes reach out to the textures of urban space, but also interrogate the human and industrial facets of supposed wilderness, from graffitied ruins in the Irish countryside to baited crab traps along BC's Gulf Islands.

Lise Gaston grew up on both sides of Canada, in Fredericton and Victoria, and has also lived in Toronto, Halifax, Montreal, and Limerick, Ireland. Her poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in journals across Canada, the United States, and Ireland, including Arc Poetry Magazine, European Romantic Review, The Fiddlehead, Lemon Hound, The Malahat Review, Matrix Magazine, Numero Cinq, and Prairie Fire. Her writing has won awards in Arc's Poem of the Year and How Poems Work contests, and has been selected for Best Canadian Poetry in English 2015. She is a graduate of English and Creative Writing programs at the University of Victoria and Concordia University in Montreal, and is now a PhD Candidate in English at the University of California, Berkeley. She divides her time between Berkeley and Edmonton. Cityscapes in Mating Season is her first book.