News at Eleven: In his second book Gift Horse

(Signal Editions, 2011), Mark Callanan is St. John's Lazarus. He's even in St. John's. The book was written after a near-fatal bout with meningitis, an infection of the lining of the brain. We get a hint of Callanan's technique in the book's opening poem, "Butchering Crab" where even though he's "thinking now/of being halved by forces/bigger than myself," his thinking of his own death doesn't translate unmitigated to the page. He writes "none of this/is quite what I meant to say." But that isn't because he's incapable of saying it.

from National Post: Michael Lista, On Poetry: Mark Callanan's incredible poems of mortality

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