Singular Plurals

An incisive and playful first book exploring language and space, Singular Plurals presents us with fictive—often surreal—images encapsulated in text that is layered in meaning, playful with language and polyphonous in tone. The poems explore the irregular spaces and tangential lines that separate and connect us, sometimes by gazing from a great distance, then zooming in for the close-up shot. Prevost is a winner of Bywords’ John Newlove Poetry Award, and a self-described “explorer of here / now’s edge.” Singular Plurals is his first full-length book of poetry.

Roland Prevost‘s poetry appears in Arc Poetry Magazine, Descant Magazine, The Toronto Quarterly, Dusie, The Ottawa Arts Review, Stone Chisel, The Bywords Quarterly Journal, The Peter F. Yacht Club and Ottawater, among many more. He has four chapbooks: Metafizz (2007, Bywords), Dragon Verses (2009, Dusty Owl), Our/Are Carried Invisibles (2009, above/ground), and Parapagus (2012, above/ground). He’s also been published in three poetry collections by Angel House Press. He won the 2006 John Newlove Poetry Award. He was, for a few years, the managing editor of 17 seconds: a journal of poetry and poetics, as well as poetics.ca, both online.

“If what you snatch from the table of contents are titles, those alone are rich eating but the amuse-bouche of words continue to courses informed by the particular, people and places, a scope of emotions under the microscope. poems are often about what, but these encompass pondering why, and all the depth of cells under the why.”—Pearl Pirie

“Roland Prevost is a poet who pays careful and loving attention to the sounds, motions, phenomena and humanity of this world as it is and as it might be—and shares with you an uncommon language with which to participate in that attentiveness. A hand gesture, a telescopic view, a portmanteau word, a coinage new and apt, create a kind of waveform of language that is intimate and wise, kinetic and hushed.”—Stephen Brockwell