Corked

"In Catriona Strang's poetry, the domestic sphere is comfortably private (spherically shaped) only because a globalized technological continuum of warfare and manufacture makes it so. Corked multiplies such contradictions. First-person pronouns are plural to their rhetorical core. Memory's a possession to be rid of. Captain Picard, you and your Chateau Picard are put on notice: To explore the continuum, Corked turns domestic space into a foreign planetary body, and language into a Curiosity rover. Corked touches down through vast internal distances to find a spring of our condition - as seen from here, 'the Strang terrain' - in Marcel Proust. The super-fine instrumentation of these poems sends back big data on the intonational and rhythmical contours of intimacy undertaking to live in a continuous (relentless) present tense. Live it."
- Louis Cabri

"... a miraculous book that is a poetic, political and affective constellation that recalibrates how a poem might work today as a representation of a moment that is both precarious and self-assured, contradictory and confident.." - Jeff Derksen

"One may be compelled by Corked toward non-meanings, but not toward whatever-meanings. Meaning in this work results from an accumulation: of repititions, of contradictions, contraints, and intrusions, as in Proust. But there is no ambiguity."
- Capilano Review

"The title piece, by contrast, juxtaposes letters to Marcel Proust with ''tempered fragment'-individual poems with jags and glitches that represent 'shaky transitory moments external to capital's seemingly omnipotent pulse.' While these poems inevitably engage the Proustian theme of memory's precariousness, they work hardest to advocate for the 'unprofitable' and 'unproductive' work of domestic life-'the weight women carry daily.'- Canadian Literature

"One may be compelled by 'Corked ' toward non-meanings, but not toward whatever-meanings. Meaning in this work results from an accumulation: of repititions, of contradictions, contraints, and intrusions, as in Proust. But there is no ambiguity."
- Capilano Review