Perfection

Patrick Warner’s Perfection — the follow-up to his award-winning Mole — makes a carnival of our most potent and dangerous obsessions. A factory outlet sells designer human parts at cut-rate prices, a midlife crisis becomes a cleansing ritual, a chocolate-chip pancake stands accused at trial, and the predatory voice of anorexia speaks to a transfixed audience. In descending the rabbit hole of this wildly imaginative collection, we find ourselves amid a field of engagement where destructive ideals of beauty, politics, art, romantic love, and spirituality are ambushed by roguish parody, acerbic satire, life-affirming laughter, and a hard-won pragmatism. And while Warner’s trademark playfulness and formal ingenuity remain intact, his classic arms-length objectivity gives ground to a private and autobiographical directness of style often evaded in his earlier work. In Perfection, where death is certain and certainty is hell-bent on death, Warner refuses to rest on his laurels, continuing to build on his reputation as one of the most respected voices in Canadian poetry.