Continuity Errors

by Catriona Wright

FINALIST FOR THE 2024 TRILLIUM BOOK AWARD FOR POETRY

Feminist poems both serious and absurd that question our obsession with productivity instead of with care.


​​Continuity Errors questions the privileging of work and productivity over rest and care from an ecological and feminist perspective. These lyric, prose, and persona poems situate themselves within the domestic sphere of childbirth and childcare where different voices--many fantastical or historical--and registers--from corporate euphemism to earnest confessional--explore preoccupations around what roles innovation and maintenance play in our lives.


In Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969!, Mierle Laderman Ukeles wrote, "Maintenance is a drag; it takes all the f*cking time (lit.) The mind boggles and chafes at the boredom. The culture confers lousy status on maintenance jobs = minimum wages, housewives = no pay." In Continuity Errors, moments of reflection are disrupted with splashes of levity, absurdity, and raunchiness that ask the reader to consider how labor and play make up our days.

"Catriona Wright's Continuity Errors is a book of snaking moves and sneaking intellect, a book of style and fortitude and sass. Wright's always sharp and often eerie interrogations lead us through a world of cryptocurrency, grunt work, predictive policing, extinction, haute cuisine, billboard ads, smoke breaks, breast pumps; these are poems for our moment of onslaught and bewilderment that, having had the world forced down their throats, spit back." - Natalie Shapero, author of Popular Longing

Genres: Poetry, Feminism

ebook

Published May 23, 2023

About the author

Catriona Wright is the author of the poetry collection Table Manners and the short story collection Difficult People. Her poems have appeared in the American Poetry Review, the Walrus, and Magma, and they have been anthologized in The Next Wave: An Anthology of 21st Century Canadian Poetry and in The Best Canadian Poetry 2015 and 2018.

Reviews

[Jillian B · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful poems with a surrealist, speculative feel. This book was a delight!

[Mariana Jimenez · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wright is a wordsmith, unlocking the secrets of birth and death (womanhood) with ease and dexterity. Made me cry and worstened my baby fever.

[Tina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Continuity Errors by Catriona Wright is excellent! Within 3 sections these 33 poems are about motherhood, transformation, work, dreams and love. The first poem Continuity enamoured me right away with mentions of Bloor and the myriad of possibilities in life. My fave poems are Continuity, Wings, SUBJECT: Money Is Dormant within You ! All Around You the Universe Pulses with It ! and Viable.

Thank you to Coach House Books for my advance review copy!

[Varnika Thukral · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are some books, some verses which are personal to the writer, the plotter but then there exist some which pull you and bend you to travel along as if those experiences were yours. This collection of poetry was nothing different than a true, critical and realistic yet wicked and weird expression of womanhood throughout the stages of life. At points it made me feel nostalgic and at others it made me stare blankly at a wall in full surprise. It talks briefly about motherhood and insanity of life, how simple things might as well trigger memories, good or bad at random. Moreover, it does not fail to deliver ideas about differences and experience as an entity to exist in a broken world with an idea that one would not choose to be here if they ever were given a choice.

Not only that, this book has vivid descriptions when comes down to narrating a part as a reader we might not be able to decipher elsewhere in a manner that
It's a twisted little book you would never know you required until you start with a verse and swallow it down to the very last one. As a poet, myself, I will travel back to this book again and again until the poet writes another one.

[Kate · Rating 4 out of 5]

|| CONTINUITY ERRORS ||
#gifted/@coachhousebooks
Out May 23rd
✍🏻

I really enjoyed these poems. I found them fresh and timely as they explored the constant pushing of produtivity over rest and what this is doing to us as a society. Wright really makes you think what the future will hold, coupled with technology's pros and cons, ecological disaster and other in your face things our world has ample of.

I first read Wright's short story collection DIFFICULT PEOPLE a few years ago and loved her writing! These poems were just as enjoyable and moving.

For more of my book content check out instagram.com/bookalong

[Rhiannon Johnson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I received a copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

A thoughtful, poetic addition to the "working" mother canon of thought and debate.

[erin · Rating 3 out of 5]

3 stars

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solid poetry collection! but i do have to admit that "bargained with my bouncers" is the funniest sentence ive ever read

[Romane · Rating 4 out of 5]

To familiarize myself with poetry and to read more, I decided to read a poem a day. I kept up the pace for a few days and then I read it all at once because I was finally frustrated with just reading little bit by little bit.

Catriona wright's texts address how our obsessive and extreme attitude towards innovation, productivity, and modernity is eating away at our mental, physical and environmental well-being. She wrote this collection just after the birth of her child, and imagines the world her son will know.

I think I particularly liked this collection because I immediately fell in love with its message, it is a sharp and committed poetry, which concerns us and in which we recognize ourselves. I often have trouble appreciating poetry that is too classic and "overloaded", here I liked the absurdity and the seriousness that alternate and support the message. Especially since her feminist and ecological point of view made me find myself in her prose.

I will definitely take a look at her works of poetry and short stories! And I encourage you to support her work.

[Elena Macdonald · Rating 3 out of 5]

better upon reread!! interesting musings on motherhood & womanhood