“Readers should expect mischievous moves for something weirder than what we have to live.”
That’s how Dr. Dale Tracy, an instructor of English at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, describes her new book, Derelict Bicycles. This is her first collection of poems.
“The poems record my thinking across several years. I guess I haven’t finished answering the questions that these poems ask, since they keep asking them.”
“The poems deal with the conventions of institutions and their effects, and they try to work out other kinds of relationships with ideas, people, trees, water, material conditions, imagined conditions, real and dreamy animals, and the present making its paths into a future.”
She named the book Derelict Bicycles after seeing an email at a previous institution about the removal of derelict bicycles from campus.
“The derelict bicycle struck me as symbolic somehow of institutional breakdown—something rundown that’s meant to travel onward. The bureaucratic mechanisms struck me too—these ruined bicycles should be getting people somewhere, but instead someone had to compose an email about them so that someone else could collect them all and bring them somewhere for someone else to deal with somehow.”
Dr. Tracy says she writes poems to figure out how to live and to think.
“The way poems work—with their patterned, looping, recursive, intuitive structures that can be both idiosyncratic and built from inherited conventions—helps me think.”