Buoyancy Control / Book*hug (ePub)

Adrienne Gruber is the author of the poetry collection This is the Nightmare (2008; shortlisted for the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry) and three chapbooks: Intertidal Zones (2014), Mimic (2012; winner of a bpNichol Chapbook Award), and Everything Water (2011). Her work has appeared in numerous literary magazines, including Grain, Event, Arc Poetry Magazine, Poetry is Dead, and Plentitude. She has been a finalist for the CBC Literary Awards in poetry, Descant's Winston Collins Best Canadian Poem Contest, and twice for Arc's Poem of the Year Contest. Her poem "Gestational Trail" was awarded first prize in The Antigonish Review's Great Blue Heron Poetry Contest in 2015. Gruber lives in Vancouver with her partner Dennis and their two daughters.

Praise for Buoyancy Control:

"Akin to the Indonesian mimic octopus, the poems in Buoyancy Control 'ascend from the ocean floor,' and proceed to evolve with an uncommon beauty. Both starkly sexual and aposematic, Adrienne Gruber's second book is remarkably controlled, framing the human condition in a world that's constantly shifting. Buoyancy Control is a fearless collection from one of Canada's best emerging poets." —Jim Johnstone, author of Dog Ear

"Densely, disturbingly erotic, Adrienne Gruber's Buoyancy Control is not a book for the faint of heart. Gruber's erotic reach encompasses the world entire, from undersea creatures to the human body of the beloved. No Hallmark sweetness in this collection—here is a fierce, wet, pulsing hunger, though there is an acute sensitivity in these observations, whether of childbirth, cold-water swimming, or other moments of convulsion and transformation so powerful that they transcend intellect. Here are poems that burst like fireworks, 'all thought blasted into the night sky.'" —Rachel Rose, Poet Laureate of Vancouver, author of Marry and Burn

"The lust and loneliness that muscle us between open water and inky depth vie for power in Buoyancy Control. Gruber's poems consume aqua life, roadkill, citrus, hotel beds, and dock-edge gargoyles as fuel for 'spit-shined' words that surface as moans and as 'sharp, atomized shrieks.' Plaintive, ecstatic, carnal, these pieces often wonder whether we’re 'complete on our own,' while veering between the urgency of self-pleasure, the defensiveness of self-containment, and the wound of self-reflexivity. Plumbing the digestive debris that skates the sea floor, Gruber's poems muck about with our equilibrium. We rise and sink lured by shadowscapes, pleasurelands and the hunt for a healthy gravity." —Brecken Hancock, author of Broom Broom, winner of the 2015 Trillium Book Award for Poetry