love in a dry land

There isn’t anyone beyond Cooley able to offer such wild, prairie vernacular, let alone one riffing off a singular work by Sinclair Ross. From Country Music to The Bentleys to love in a dry land, Dennis Cooley playfully provides lyrics as pure gesture, intellectual wordplay and spinning puns in a magical articulation and expansion of open form. Okay, cool it, krazy mclennan, I hear Cooley say, but he can’t deny any of it. love in a dry land is an absolute delight. —rob mclennan, the book of smaller

Between the lines of As for Me and My House, if you squint, love in a dry land materializes. In this long poem, Dennis Cooley revives characters who’ve long been cast in the amber of CanLit canonization. These pages uncover the subtle graces in a home where regrets stick on fly paper, corn syrup coats anxieties, and desires glow behind lampshades. —Nathan Dueck, (1979– )