Dwell

Don Precosky teaches English at the College of New Caledonia and is the
co-editor of Four Realities: Poets of Northern B.C.

As the techies like to say, this is cutting-edge stuff: a collection of
apparently nonlinear texts that manages to achieve a kind of
associative, surrealist linearity. The book is an amalgam of fragments,
bits of anecdotes told out of context, and snippets of political and
commercial language. Reading Dwell is a bit like tuning rapidly across
the radio spectrum in a big city. All one hears are bits and pieces, yet
it’s a profile (of sorts) of the social, commercial, and public life
of a place. Behind the experimentation and wordplay is a serious
political purpose at work. By breaking language into chunks and
fragments, Derksen breaks out societal practices into examinable parts.
“Interface,” with its repeated references to statistics that have no
meaning (e.g., “Soviet Union, 24.9%,” “United States, 18.3%”),
is a brilliant example of his method; we are never told what the
percentages are measuring, yet we feel that they must be important
because we have been conditioned to accept quantification as a way of
establishing truth.

In “If History Is the Memory of Time What Would Our Monument Be,”
Derksen writes, “Not so much master narrative, but master metaphor.”
I doubt that his goal is quite as egotistical as it sounds in this line,
but it is true that he is more concerned with metaphor than with
narrative. There is not enough unity in our experience to justify a
narrative about it.