Anatomy of Keys

by Steven Price

Steven Price's Houdini knows better than most the limitations of life, having bent the efforts of a lifetime to transcending them, and having failed. Ah, but his thinking! Or rather Steven Price's thinking with and through him. "Make it muscular and be apparent in it," says Houdini's archivist/advisor, "words are also escapes." So they are in a book with the sinew of Anatomy of Keys. The facts of Houdini's life are here - immigration to America, youth, circus stint, fame, that notorious life-ending punch - but the facts are the spine of a deep and ardent meditation on what is. In poems of astonishing technical virtuosity, Steven Price reads Houdini's world and our own in compellingly original ways.

Genres: Poetry

141 pages, Paperback

First published May 29, 2006

About the author

Steven Price is a Canadian poet and novelist.

He graduated from the University of Victoria with a BFA in 2000, and from the University of Virginia with an MFA, in poetry.

Price's first collection of poems, Anatomy of Keys (2006), won Canada's 2007 Gerald Lampert Award for Best First Collection, was short-listed for the BC Poetry Prize, and was named a Globe and Mail Book of the Year. His first novel, Into That Darkness (2011), was short-listed for the 2012 BC Fiction Prize. His second collection of poems, Omens in the Year of the Ox (2012), won the 2013 ReLit Award.

Price teaches poetry and fiction at the University of Victoria, where he lives with his partner, novelist Esi Edugyan.

Reviews

[Open Loop Press · Rating 5 out of 5]

At 135 pages, Steven Price's Anatomy of Keys is no slim volume of verse; how could it be? Tracing the track of a famous life full of remarkable acts, Price transforms a historical figure into a fictional character, rendering his story in verse. Harry Houdini, whose incredible escapes made him one of the most well-known men of his day, is revealed in Price’s work to have been a playful child, a vulnerable performer, a loyal husband, a grief-besieged son, as well as the escape artist we know, that man of the modern age. So Price explores the interior of persona, challenging our assumptions about headline-makers and revealing the human interior of fame:

Offstage, he looked
too ordinary in his strength to be so;
short and stumpish like a pugilist, he lived
by his fists, all ox-neck and thick root,
all barrel-chest, battered like a kitchen chair.

We find ourselves immersed in a work of imagination, a fictionalized biography that proceeds from Houdini’s childhood, through adolescence and into adulthood, exploring the years Houdini’s escapes were known around the world.

Through closed forms—the sonnet, the ghazal—and intricate interior rhythms, regulated rhyme scheme, free verse, prose poems, sections in series, Price crafts a collection of astute observations:

So that, trembling, fingering my skin, I began to doubt: had I
accomplished this, who was not remarkable, no more than others?

This, which sang in me for a time, then fell silent.

Months of dust and rain, abandoned, in flickering railcars. It is true: to
live without illusion is to live without hope.

Thus the fragility of the self is alive in even the most incredible acts. So Price gives us a three-dimensional Harry Houdini with an interior life as rich as his performing one.

Though “Anatomy of Keys” is not a biography, not in the technical sense, through his capacity for empathy Steven Price offers something equally compelling: a life story rich in detail which challenges our expectations and lingers long after we finish the final line.

–Carlin M. Wragg, Editor, Open Loop Press