"Joe Denham displays similar precision in the sequence "Night Haul, Morning Set," a pitch-perfect suite of sixteen sixteen-line poems about his time as a commercial fisherman on the West Coast. Like Trower, Denham exploits the specialized vocabulary of his trade to its fullest potential, his poems stocked with terms like "hauler," "set," "pike pole," "davit" and more; terms obscure to the layman but which need no explanation because they are props in vividly realized scenes. And like Babstock, Denham presents the sometimes bleak plight of the worker obliquely, drawing subtle lines of connection between the life of prey and predator. In one poem, rain gear is "[s]tiff as a crustacean's carapace"; in another oneiric piece, the speaker "crawl[s] the sea floor, crustaceous" and is then violently hauled up to the surface; in another, the poet reflects on his subordinate role in the piscine economy while gutting a squid:

I bring the glinting blade down and
cut the blue-grey guts away, catch
my reflection in the steel-shaft
mirror: guilt-wracked, gut-sick
for two bucks a pound, fish feed,
tako sushi on Robson Street.

These poems display a wealth of dramatic tension, metaphorical vaulting, verbal dexterity and formal wherewithal. They present work not as a cardboard template for ideological grandstanding, but as a complex and fully realized verbal world."
-Zach Wells, Maisonneuve Magazine

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"These poems display a wealth of dramatic tension, metaphorical vaulting, verbal dexterity and formal wherewithal. They present work not as a cardboard template for ideological grandstanding, but as a complex and fully realized verbal world."
-Zach Wells, Maisonneuve Magazine

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"Less sentimental than the work of Brad Cran but not as hard-knuckled as that of Ken Babstock, Denham is nevertheless a manly man poet, with tales of broken guitars, boyhood scraps and middle-of-the-night sex, plus a few well-placed pieces of profanity."
-Emily Schultz, Broken Pencil

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". . . salt-seared philosophies and sharp images colliding."
-Robert Moore, Winnipeg Free Press

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". . . roughly hewn cadences of work and pain, an all-pervading awareness of mortality, and a quiet sense of the sacred. . . One can hear faint echoes of Purdy and Patrick Lane in the tight, muscular voice, while such poems as "Dowsing" echo with Seamus Heaney. Yet Denham's voice remains his own."
-Rob Wiersema, Quill and Quire

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"Joe Denham is just what the insular Canadian poetry world needed - an unheralded talent. Not since Ken Babstock has such a poet arrived..." -Shane Neilson, Arc

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"Denham writes of the hydraulic details of work, memory's second-guesses and aching knots, the itch of passing time, out of a solitude both fragile and resolute. His poems live here in a state of heads-up--wide awake, eyes open."
-Karen Solie

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"A book seems almost an inappropriate medium for these poems. They are too accessible, too real to be relegated to a bookshelf. . . ."
-The Martlet (University of Victoria)

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"With a lyric intensity refreshingly free of pop pyrotechnics Joe Denham's poems pull compelling music from work, love and grief. Immersed in urban and rural angst, in natural splendour and a desperate resource economy, his resources are self-awareness, imagistic integrity and an emerging grace note of personal responsibility, of sympathy, a premonition of homecoming."
-John Pass

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"A new direction for Canadian poetry . . . Denham is wonderful. Denham's protean, sonically incisive language--with its on-the-go speed--requires from us a broader notion of 'experimental' . . . [David] O'Meara and Denham are now central players in a generation whose collective achievements promise to add to the stock of Canadian poetry's available poetic modes. What they now need--and deserve--is readers."
-Carmine Starnino, Globe and Mail

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"A refreshing debut from a new and energetic poet. Denham writes compellingly about his experiences in the bush and on the beach, mending nets and hauling traps. Poems for those who've been there. A sparkling new voice on the west coast."
-Western Mariner

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"Joe Denham has been deservedly praised for his technical competence and his first-hand testimony to manual labour, and in Flux he makes fierce music out of prawn fishing... Denham displays integrity and respect in his engagement with the mountains and waters of the West Coast. His work has been favourably compared with the work of Patrick Lane... Denham is a thoughtful and articulate witness reporting from the frontlines of the crisis, and his talent forces us to listen."
-warren heiti, Canadian Literature

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"'Night Haul, Morning Set'... demonstrates the success of writing in which choices are made with an eye and ear driven by literary fidelity to what one perceives or experiences. The tangible quality of the work done here lends itself to rich word deposits, which Denham uses to his, and the reader's, advantage... The poems strive to convey vivid and meaningful--and hence memorable--images, such as the men on the boat as musicians waiting on cue; of the music in the boat's 'industrial gramophone'; of the tight-fit on the ship, as one is 'bent into the boat's cramped belly.'"
-Jennifer Varkonyi, Books in Canada

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"Joe Denham writes about the sea in a manner at once lyrical and refreshingly unromantic... There's a pull here between natural and artificial landscape that gives this collection a real spark."
-Chris Knight, Canadian Book Review Annual