nathan dueck thinks really hard about pop culture. In his new collection, A Very Special Episode, he pays serious attention to the pieces of our past that have been lost in the internet era, whether it is magnetic tapes or the Smurfs, rabbit-ear antennas or She-Ra. A child of the '80s dueck plays with the past and with our ideas of a poetry canon. In these playfully challenging recreations we find Mr. T in The Waste Land and a selection of sonnets – one for every letter of the alphabet – on topics from the Care Bears to Zoobilee Zoo. This is a smart, entertaining and ultimately questioning collection, one that asks us to consider how our ideas are shaped by the cultures surrounding us.

nathan dueck’s middle name is russel, which means his initials spell nrd. His folks tell him that nobody used that word when he was born, but dictionaries say otherwise. He is the author of king’s(mère) (Turnstone Press) and he’ll (Pedlar Press). Born in Winnipeg, he completed his Ph.D. at the University of Calgary and now lives in Cranbrook, BC, where he is a creative writing and English instructor at the College of the Rockies.

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"Dueck's [collection] takes pop-culture and television nostalgia to the next level by offering careful, complexly crafted creations that seek to splice Saturday morning camp together with musical meter."

Winnipeg Free Press