Rust Canyon

“In Rust Canyon the Big Sky blazes as bright as ever, but in the hands of Lauren Mason the light is also a thing of terror, an agent of neglect and even violence, as the powerful compaction of the style makes it at once a vast landscape and a trembling domestic space. Force and fragility battle in this realm – how should I call for love? is the cry from its soul – as humans, animals, plants and stones share their common losses and desires and despairing thirst, and ‘All the ways I couldn’t leave/led here…’ This is a powerful, plangent and deeply moving collection.”

Glyn Maxwell

“Like the painter Georgia O’Keeffe (a presiding spirit in these poems), Lauren Mason tracks beauty and peril in the vast landscapes of canyon, desert, river, and transposes these terrains to the contour of bodies in passion, in rest, in (re)birth. Such locations – actual and known, but also taken from the world of dream – are vividly rendered in Mason’s assured voice. These poems are diamond-like in their brilliance and multifaceted reflections, but they are also sharp and tough. It is always exciting to encounter a debut pamphlet, but this is one I am particularly excited to see in the world.”

Tamar Yoseloff

Rust Canyon is very ecological and very unflinching.

ISBN: 978-1-7394122-9-6
36 pages

R.R.P. £7.50

A sample poem may be enjoyed below.

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Rust Canyon (with p&p options)

Rust Canyon (with p&p for UK delivery) £9.49 GBP Rust Canyon (with p&p for non-EU Rest of World delivery) £23.50 GBP

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Vacation

we drove the desert for ten days

through monsoon season 

the canyons smelt of ozone  

roadside deer were pixellations

my mother bought pottery 

painted the colour of bruises

in pastel motels we watched true-crime shows 

where men stalked women with buck knives 

all those wives’ and daughters’

voices distorting into white noise

down the emergency line and we did not 

look at each other          often I wouldn’t sleep 

the lightning quick and expected as a fist 

splitting the already swollen sky