If Pressed

If Pressed--the second collection of poetry from acclaimed Canadian poet Andrew McEwan--explores forms of pressurized and pressurizing language as a means to shed light on the depressions we live among in our modern-day lives.
Overlapping language of fear and speculation gain momentum in these poems, where layers of atmospheric and emotional lexicons--ranging from descriptions of the mid-2000s financial crisis and subsequent recession, to writing on melancholia from the 1600s, to weather reports and condo listings, to pharmaceutical sales pitches and literary book reviews--focus attention on the ways that anxiety so easily and completely infiltrates our daily personal and public experiences.
Praise for If Pressed
-The poems in Andrew McEwan's If Pressed form a 'Book of Disquiet' that revises Pessoa's gloomy wanderings for a 21st North American century, in a world where ideologico-social retrogressions meld science and market consumption into one. Pressed here, the consumptional compositional mind struggles valiantly in its body like a pinned bug or flower to enfront the dystopias of Now. This is taut and accomplished work.- --Erin Moure