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Friday, June 02, 2017


If we are to take contemporary writing at its word, then Chris Hutchinson is among its foremost practitioners, forsaking the certainties of space, time and locus for that collective unconscious known as the internet. This is fleet-of-foot, informed writing — tomorrow’s writing today — that draws on a broad cultural reference range, a dual diagnosis of mental illness and drugs collaged from a million little pieces. Like his book’s titular character, Hutchinson is a writer who has “lived with himself long enough to know that he is somehow different, and that there is no escaping.” ~ Michael Turner, author of 8 x 10




"Hutchinson's poems read as though written by a benign, alien intelligence: different from our own, faraway, yet nonetheless in awe of what it best understands. If we don't tune-in to these wonderful, unexpected frequencies, then we are probably doomed.”~Paul Vermeersch



Reviews of A Brief History of the Short-lived






"Chris Hutchinson's second collection of poems is remarkable for its lyric foldings, its lyric expansions, both of which permit a sort of vivid time travel where wisdom collects and stands against sadness and happiness — this is the logic of an Elizabethan underground — simply brilliant!"

Buy Other People's Lives for your e-reader

Reviews of Other People's Lives




Hutchinson brings a sharp set of linguistic tools to bear on the cities and people that surround him. His poetic project is not only to encapsulate the everyday in words, but also to use words to draw attention to that which exists outside of language. It is this subtlety, along with a keen sense of irony, that allows Hutchinson to examine nothing less than the human condition.
~Alison Pick,The Globe and Mail


Reviews of Unfamiliar Weather

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Hutchinson honours both the "centre" and the "fringes" - his work has the inclusive, searching authority of Jorie Graham coupled with Heather McHugh's nimble and playful attention to sound. He's in the desert exposed to the elements one moment and stick-handling in a phone-booth the next.