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Derek Beaulieu is the author/editor of over twenty-five collections of poetry, prose, and criticism. His most recent volume of fiction, a, A Novel, was published by France’s Jean Boîte Editions, his most recent volume of poetry, Surface Tension, is his third from Coach House Books. Beaulieu has exhibited his visual work across Canada, the United States, and Europe and has won multiple local and national awards for his teaching and dedication to students. Derek Beaulieu is the Director of Literary Arts at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity and Banff’s 2022-2024 Poet Laureate.
"""In Surface Tension, the symbolic material of language – letter shapes – float, pool, dance, swim, jag, and jiggle. Imagine all that labour, the poet rubbing, twisting, thinking – the creative act, intuitive and structured, made physical. Letters become a substance reclaimed and reimagined, stretching a history of twentieth-century commerce and of earlier script, glyph, and rock scraping. It is writing, music, movement, vision, imagination, communication – and poetry – and is most engaging at that."" – Steven Ross Smith, FREEFALL ""Surface Tension upholds reverb, sway, and slipstream. But its scaffolding is communal, propelled by the urgency of living in and among not in spite of, like an improvised piano piece folding a car alarm into its melody, reminding us, always, we must participate in the matter of poetry."" – Sarah Burgoyne, ARC Poetry ""Beaulieu references the physical point where liquid shrinks and reshapes into the minimum surface, offering not simply metaphor but description of how poetic form is and can be shaped, offering a sequence of visual sequences, each composed as a succession of text-forms in sequence, some of which move from the recognizable into purely abstract, but every bit of the sequence intact."" – rob mclennan ""In the beginning, in the medias res, and in the sense of an ending: of the making of Derek Beaulieu's poems there is no end."" – Michael Greenstein, The Miramichi Reader ""In Surface Tension Derek Beaulieu continues to set all sorts of things in motion, extending and refining the possibilities of poetry."" – Rupert Loydell, Tears in the Fence ""Beaulieu has taken note of the ur-sign of neo-liberalism and of capitalism, the ever-present logo, and reinhabited it from the inside, creating logos without products, a body of schizoid writing without anything to sell, without an interpellative agenda of power and subjection, that free us from the norms of purchase and exchange."" – Philip Terry, gorse ""Surface Tension is an effort to define and perform a modern poetics simultaneously."" – Andrew Brenza, Heavy Feather Review ""Derek Beaulieu’s Surface Tension inhabits that same non-universe, where the neglected and meaningless share space with hypnotic, hypnagogic artwork that certainly deserves the moniker ‘visual poetry.'"" – Gordon Phinn, WordCityLIt"
