Leap-Seconds

by Paul Zits

A shocking, unnerving narrative, at its heart a love story, Leap-seconds is built of recombinant fragments from a profusion of sources. But also at its core is the question "How does one represent violence in language?" If violence does not derive from a place of soundness, then its product should be utterly confusing, ultimately paralyzing. The collection chronicles a bewilderment with institutionalized violence and the anxiety felt by a systemic desensitizationtowards it. So the rhythms are aggressively arranged, excessive, the single-mindedness of its repetitions an assault. It's mannerist patterns seek to enliven our senses, bring us to our senses, render us sensitive. A varied and polytonic manuscript, approaching unsettling content with nerve and empathy, Leap-seconds is a compelling treatise on violence and a stark encounter with the apparatus by which it is so often normalized.

150 pages, Paperback

Published July 28, 2017

About the author

Paul Zits received his MA in English from the University of Calgary in 2010. His creative dissertation, and first book, Massacre Street (University of Alberta Press, 2014), won the Stephan G. Stephansson Award for Poetry at the 2014 Alberta Literary Awards.

His second book, Leap-seconds (Insomniac Press, 2017), won the 2016 Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry.

Exhibit, which won the Robert Kroetsch Award for Poetry in 2020, explores the trial of Margaret McPhail, accused of the murder of her brother in the winter of 1926.

His latest collection, I Wish I Could be Peter Falk (2022), is described as a "nuanced exploration of modern masculinity and a warning of the dangers that persist when the commodification of gender goes unchecked."

Zits is a Calgary-based secondary teacher.

Reviews

[Hsu Jui-Ting · Rating 3 out of 5]

At its best, Leap-Seconds offers a glimmer of that "language of violence" that its blurb maintains is the core focus of the work, but too often its fragmentary narrative seems woefully designed as such; that the terse, single-minded repetition should come to dominate means that these "fragments" here become indistinguishable from the others, and designed to neatly (or intentionally) pair. It makes for relatively smooth reading (as much as smooth can be when dealing with specific interludes of children's interjections), but as a result, everything inhabits a turgid, lifeless air about it. That doubles with small excerpts from other authors, whose snippets enlighten the reading and make a clear difference already in terms of diction.

(Might try to revisit one day, and not speed through it like some sort of demon; perhaps that reading might illuminate more for me than this cursory one did.)

[Laura · Rating 1 out of 5]

I just couldn't connect to the style of his poetry in this collection.