Catalogue d’oiseaux by Aaron Tucker

Catalogue d’oiseaux recounts a year in the life of a couple separated by distance, carefully documenting time spent together and apart. When reunited, they embark on travels across the globe—from Toronto to Berlin, Porto to the Yukon. This expansive poem moves sensually through small, intimate spaces and the larger world alike. Traced through art, architecture, and the cultural life of various cities, this stunning celebration of love lives between geographies and chronologies as a kaleidoscopic gathering of the many fractals that make up a couple’s life.

Praise for Catalogue d’oiseaux:

“Tucker’s elegant lines, each a marvel, like the finest of lenses, draw us into exact focus, remind us of why we cascade trip fall head over heels at all. Here within the immensities of love we experience ourselves, trees, birds, streets, buildings, worlds, as bodies in every heightened, intricate detail, anew. My pilot light is aflame.” —Kirby, author of This is Where I Get Off

“Aaron Tucker’s Catalogue d’oiseaux fractures Olivier Messiaen’s music of the same name into poetic lenses through which to relive the past in a continuous and unfurling present. Nostalgia glows in romance, and is then activated through the vibrancy of art and the experience of bodies. This wondrous long poem creates a signature gesture of compound words, aligning the protagonists in their love and languagelove.” —Klara du Plessis, author of Hell, Light, Flesh

Press Coverage:

Most Anticipated: Our 2021 Spring Poetry Preview —49th Shelf

“Tucker writes on reading, travel, musical composition, writing and long distances, allowing the flourishing of this new relationship, this new connection, to hold as the central basis of the poem’s strength and momentum. There is something interesting in the blend of the intimately personal and the structural that Tucker explores in this singular poem.” —rob mclennan’s blog

55 Canadian Poetry Collections to Check Out in Spring 2021 —CBC Books

“This book-length poem catalogues a variety of the events, sights, sounds, tastes and other engaging aspects in the memory of a year in a couple’s life, as they live separated by an ocean but come together in occasional visits. Tucker moves casually and breezily across this distance, skipping from moment to moment as quickly as a stone might skip out into that ocean.” —Jonathan Ball, Winnipeg Free Press

Poetry Express: Aaron Tucker + Catalogue d’oiseaux —All Lit Up

KFB Presents: Cover 2 Cover, a Complete Reading of Catalogue d’oiseaux by Aaron Tucker —Cover2Cover

“Tucker’s language is crunchy, fresh, and unexpected, repeatedly likening the kinship between lovers to non-human kin, crafting an interdisciplinary poetics of relation that marks Tucker as an innovative, shapeshifting writer.” —Shazia Hafiz Ramji, Hamilton Review of Books

Best of 2020-2021: Poetry Books & Poetry Collections —Entropy

“This is a a book about humans remembering themselves through their bodies. And birds. Of course. Just don’t be fooled by the space of each page, which makes the lines look like the transmission is breaking up as you cross the mountains. Their real performance space is somewhere between that page and your tongue as you sing along. And that’s the point.” —Harold Rhenisch, The British Columbia Review

Aaron Tucker was born and raised on traditional Syilx territory in Lavington B.C. and now lives in Toronto as a guest on the Dish With One Spoon Territory. His novel, Y (2018), was translated into French as Oppenheimer in 2020. He is also the author of two previous poetry collections, including Irresponsible Mediums: The Chess Games of Marcel Duchamp (Book*hug Press, 2017). He is currently a PhD candidate in the Cinema and Media Studies Department at York University where he is an Elia Scholar, a VISTA Doctoral Scholar, and 2020 recipient of the Joseph-Armand Bombardier Doctoral Scholarship.