L297 - Joseph LaBine

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L297 is a movingly elegiac set of stories. Memories preceding a trip to a wilderness program for adolescents recur like dreams, or nightmares: travellers arrive for a funeral; a family crashes a car; a teenager sneaks out of the house to get high; friends meet at a bar; a boy remembers the broken bones of childhood. The narrative, always more situation than premise, forms an oblique background to the highly poetic prose. The many obsessions of addiction find expression in these vignettes. They attest to love in small details, whether exploitative, familial, romantic or spatial. Rooms and architecture have just as much importance as people. LaBine’s style is as at ease in cities as in the woods, and with Medieval English as ‘May-day’ telegrams. Whatever its influences and inflections, L297 demands the reader’s attention.

L297 is a movingly elegiac set of stories. Memories preceding a trip to a wilderness program for adolescents recur like dreams, or nightmares: travellers arrive for a funeral; a family crashes a car; a teenager sneaks out of the house to get high; friends meet at a bar; a boy remembers the broken bones of childhood. The narrative, always more situation than premise, forms an oblique background to the highly poetic prose. The many obsessions of addiction find expression in these vignettes. They attest to love in small details, whether exploitative, familial, romantic or spatial. Rooms and architecture have just as much importance as people. LaBine’s style is as at ease in cities as in the woods, and with Medieval English as ‘May-day’ telegrams. Whatever its influences and inflections, L297 demands the reader’s attention.

“In language that shuttles arrestingly between the playful and the poignant, Joseph LaBine probes the boundaries of human sentiment without succumbing to sentimentalism.”
— U.S. Dhuga
 
“L297 is earthquake-proof: language clangs together across rhythmic, alliterative prose lines. Shock-absorbent, yet not unscathed, L297 sways and shifts, elicits an internal churning. How else to name the poetic surges between these pages, but as an in-built desire for destruction—and a steadying, even as things fall apart.”
— Geneviève Robichaud
 

Joseph LaBine won the 2018 Marie Tremaine Fellowship from the Bibliographic Society of Canada. His writing has appeared in The Malahat Review, Cosmonauts Avenue, and elsewhere. He lives in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories.

 

Poetry
64 Pages
ISBN: 9781989453018
November 2021

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