Reading Edge Effects, Jan Conn's masterful eighth collection, is a little like looking at Edward Burtynsky's photographs of real industrial wastelands; both visions are as gorgeous as they are terrifying, platforms for thought, even for activism, depending as they do on the energy of the viewer/reader for completion. "Edge effect" is an ecological term that has to do with the effect on an ecosystem of the juxtaposition of contrasting environments. The poems of Edge Effects have their connection to ecological matters, but they also ride other sorts of edge throughout, entering an unstable reality in which both time and space are given to uncanny shifting, so it's "easy to believe visible reality is merely one isolated phenomenon / among many

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