Overview

Starting with lyric statement as a point of interrogation, Fortified Castles asks what might cause retreat into the comforting walls of the self. North American culture is saturated with discourses of self-improvement and self-awareness at the same time it is full of anxiety over the things that separate us. Moving from a stock-ticker tableau of economic and environmental crisis to the difficulty of finding one another in the streets, the poems in Fortified Castles stage impasse after impasse, locating the Western subject between the ramparts it walks and the barricades it throws up. Composed in three sections, Fortified Castles constructs a complex web of interpersonal disconnection from the anonymous detritus of our self-obsessed neoliberal moment. Written contemporaneously with the 2008 economic crisis, the first section, ""21st Century Monsters,"" imagines a number of world-ending scenarios from the collapse of the environment to the collapse of capitalism to the collapse of culture, forming a questioning and questionable primer on the things that terrify us. The second section, ""Fortified Castles,"" heavily recombines found material in a lengthy serial collage composed of multiplied and impersonal personal statements that add up in unanticipated ways, cascading in knee-jerk patterns of anxious hand-wringing and stubborn unreasonableness. Written during the 2011 Occupy protests, the final section, ""Friendship Is Magic,"" positions the hopeful connections of that moment beside the privilege rippling through it, interrogating the very real tension between working collectively and living comfortably.

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9780889229099

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In Fortified Castles, our hero shakes down identities like a spike-filled log mashes down the meadow. In the fervor of a squint, fitzpatrick rakes the way for a honky-tonk revolution in a felt square to sip tonics of swell emotions much more dangerous than motorcycles. Fortified Castles simmers a deft cauldron of trend patrol--able to frack Kodak moments into bankrupt selfies and drain histories into broken presents. With sunshine enough to fill lonely bottles, fitzpatrick shoots a friendly neighborhood spitball that props us up at the door of a room we live, long for, and long to leave, oh so thankful for its lock. --Chris Ewart, author of Miss Lamp Fortified Castles is a book full of twists: a series of ambiguous manuals, a book-length personality quiz gone terribly awry. At first glance, characters seem self-assured--but don't be fooled. Like Beckett's talking heads, fitzpatrick's playful voices point to a larger confusion. They look at us, baffled. They point and stare. They nod their heads and pat their stomachs. And then they ask, ever so politely: Who the hell are you? --Sandy Pool, author of Exploding into Night and Undark

In Fortified Castles, our hero shakes down identities like a spike-filled log mashes down the meadow. In the fervor of a squint, fitzpatrick rakes the way for a honky-tonk revolution in a felt square to sip tonics of swell emotions much more dangerous than motorcycles. Fortified Castles simmers a deft cauldron of trend patrol-able to frack Kodak moments into bankrupt selfies and drain histories into broken presents. With sunshine enough to fill lonely bottles, fitzpatrick shoots a friendly neighborhood spitball that props us up at the door of a room we live, long for, and long to leave, oh so thankful for its lock. -Chris Ewart, author of Miss Lamp Fortified Castles is a book full of twists: a series of ambiguous manuals, a book-length personality quiz gone terribly awry. At first glance, characters seem self-assured--but don't be fooled. Like Beckett's talking heads, fitzpatrick's playful voices point to a larger confusion. They look at us, baffled. They point and stare. They nod their heads and pat their stomachs. And then they ask, ever so politely: Who the hell are you? -Sandy Pool, author of Exploding into Night and Undark

Author Information

Ryan fitzpatrick is a poet and critic living in Vancouver. He is the author of Fake Math (Snare Books, 2007), as well as a dozen chapbooks, including the recent 21st Century Monsters (Red Nettle Press, 2012), shortlisted for the bpNichol Chapbook Award. While living in Calgary, he was an editor of Filling Station magazine and an organizer of the Flywheel Reading Series. With Jonathan Ball, he is co-editor of Why Poetry Sucks: An Anthology of Humorous Experimental Canadian Poetry (Insomniac Press, 2014). With Janey Dodd, he is in the early stages of organizing a comprehensive digital archive of Calgary small presses between 1990 and 2010. He is currently pursuing a doctorate at Simon Fraser University, where he works on contemporary poetics and the social production of space.

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