Finalist for the George Ryga Award for Social Awareness

Rooted in the back alleys, squats and psychiatric wards of contemporary Vancouver and Montreal, these unyielding poems enter the intersecting tensions and intensities in characters such as Mike, a panhandler on Vancouver's Commercial Drive, Matthew, a runaway punk, and Dara, a single mother. Cusp's central sequence, however, concerns the tragic life and death of Frank Bonneville, a schizophrenic and drug-addicted artist who became Ms. Owen's muse between their 2001 meeting and his 2003 suicide. Complemented by Karen Moe's haunting photographs of Vancouver's neglected spaces and rejected objects, Cusp/detritus is a testimony to an obsession with the lost.

Praise for Cusp/Detritus:

"Catherine Owen is a shapeshifter of words, a mystic always at the edge of a precipice looking down into the absolute darkness. In reading this book, I who am by nature an escape artist in my own poetry, found myself drawn into the terrifying nucleus of this epic. Vancouver photographer Karen Moe adds further resonance to this pithy volume with her stark images, featuring found objects. They weld together hauntingly with Owen's vision of alienation and the disembodiment of the marginalized of the inner city. Trust me: I recommend this volume of poetry for those readers who feel that they still have a spiritual envelope called a soul. Read this masterpiece, weep, and be restored." (Jose Rosenblatt, author of The Voluptuous Gardener and recipient of the Governor General's Award for Poetry)

"It is intentionally unsettling, disturbing, sad, and yet, you cannot deny it, a celebration of a life." (Prairie Fire)

"... disturbing and brilliantly observed." (Winnipeg Free Press)