Since 1975, Ken Norris has produced some of Canada’s most intriguing poetry. Whether detailing the amorous lives of produce (Vegetables), documenting travels to the South Seas (The Better Part of Heaven and Islands), engaging contentious social and political issues (In the Spirit of the Times and In the House of No), or taking the measure of the successes and failures of contemporary love (The Music and Limbo Road), Norris has always given us quirky, edgy poetry that has continually revealed unanticipated possibilities and explored new horizons. His work has been widely anthologized in the English-speaking world, as well as in translation in France, Belgium and Israel. His latest book of poems, Limbo Road, is to be published this fall in translation in Quebec by Ecrits des Forges.
Hotel Montreal offers the literary traveller a haven for clandestine encounters with the intimate and the exotic. It includes selections from nineteen ground-breaking books of poetry (a number of them now out of print or hard to find), as well as a healthy selection of accomplished new poems. It draws together the very best of Norris’s lyric poetry from a 25-year period, while offering the reader an indispensable panoramic view of the work of a poet at the height of his creative power.