Track & Trace

The poems in Zachariah Wells' second collection range from childhood to dimly foreseen events in the future; they idle on all three of Canada's coasts, travel the open road, take walks in the city and pause on the banks of country streams and ponds. Using an eclectic array of techniques and forms, from haiku to a crown of sonnets, in a voice that is personal but never private, Wells sketches a fragmentary biography of a life in progress, a study of post-industrial nomadic restlessness in a rootless age. Both elegiac and celebratory, "Track & Trace" considers how we live, how we shape our lives, and how we are eroded and drifted by time and circumstance.

Zach Wells has built on "an aesthetic generally characterized by an assertive (even, at times, severe) approach to metre that is enhanced by an ardent attention to sonic effects like alliteration, syncopation, rhyme, etc., and his control over such a severe metre is both admirable and remarkable."—Paul Vermeersch "Everything poetry should be: reflective and linguistically aware, imagistic, connected to human emotion and experience. But, wait, I forgot, delightful."—Freefall "Within each poem, the words fit together in surprising ways, with subtle rhyme, rhythm and alliteration... There are layers to these poems, unexpected things beneath the surface."—Pickle Me This

Zachariah Wells: Zachariah Wells is the author of Unsettled, a collection of poems about his experiences in the Canadian Arctic. He is also a freelance critic and editor and edited Jailbreaks: 99 Canadian Sonnets.