Lost Signal

by Chris Hutchinson

Overview

In Lost Signal, Chris Hutchinson celebrates the resilience and adaptability of language, while locating the tipping points of our ongoing environmental, informational, and humanitarian crises. Subtle semantic shifts mirror ideological rifts — yet lyricism thrives, along with a diversity of perspectives, forms, and styles, affirming faith in the power of the human spirit to challenge the insidious forces shaping our collective present.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781990293917
Publisher:	Palimpsest Press
Publication date:	05/20/2025
Pages:	80
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.25(d)

About the Author

Chris Hutchinson is the author of four previous poetry books, as well as the autofictive verse-novel Jonas in Frames. He has lived all over North America, from Dawson City, Yukon, to Brooklyn, New York, working as a line cook and, more recently, teaching creative writing to undergraduates. He is now a permanent faculty member of the English Department at MacEwan University, located on Treaty 6 Territory.

Reading Group Guide

Lost Signal Ping me with your promises from decades down the tracks. Sing me off to sleep. Tonight, I'm a surgeon cutting myself open with the virtual edge of this screen. Remember how I died, as a child, from riches? Poverty, not poetry, brought me back to life. Need came first, then strife then spirit flooding in, reversed limelight spilling shadow-shapes across the page. Tonight, I'm on a train of thought that follows a famous river into this feeling of mirrors and unread books into twilight and old usages. You're just radio waves. I'm the touch of a touchscreen ¬¬¬¬ away. Please reply before I fall asleep again. Promise to write my name on the crumbling Empire's sky with your spire-like pen.

Editorial Reviews

Chris Hutchinson is one of the most finely tuned poets in Canada, and in this new collection, his intensity and originality are on full display. Lost Signal is a dizzying imaginative ride through a contemporary-culture-assaulted psyche where “at the pinnacle of distress ... our schemes / dissolve, along with all traces / of their computations.” The ride is a compelling one, shot through with pathos, intellectual acuity, and a subtle and highly affecting creative cry. — Russell Thornton, author of The White Light of Tomorrow Moving through everyday living and questions of what it means to exist in the contemporary, Lost Signal stretches poetics beyond the linear, taking into account the multiplicity of experiences that shape identity. Hutchinson calls into question not just the future, but the past and the present through smokescreens of afterhours parties, revolution, and the glare of contemporary capitalism/democracy.— Conor Kerr, author of Prairie Edge

From the Publisher