I first encountered Chris Hutchinson when my friend Jack handed me a copy of Hutchinson’s experimental novel, Jonas in Frames, which I promptly managed to misplace. On another occasion, Jack showed me a random Chris Hutchinson poem, photocopied and folded, whereupon I announced, “Chris Hutchinson is my favourite poet.”
Between then and now, I’d lost track of both Jack and Chris. So it’s fitting for me to rediscover Hutchinson’s work through a book titled Lost Signal. Short review: I’m really glad I did.
Lost Signal is about money. Or, it’s about profit and loss, and not just of money. Signals and signifiers, the slippage between what’s said and what’s unsayable. The commodified life.
What I love about Hutchinson’s poetry, and what struck me in the poem that Jack had showed me back when, is its way of edging around the sides of things to show their distorted shapes, so as to reveal the strange in the familiar. In the poem “Aurora” from this collection, for example, Hutchinson succeeds in crafting a novel image of that old poetic subject, the moon. Here it’s “… the ice- / cream-lid of the moon / sealed tight.”
Just a few pages later, he’s at it again, but now with a self-deprecating take on the efficacy of his own imaginative voice: “How many rooms did I build / how many labyrinths of doubt // each enclosing at least one / tortuously wrought intellectual-slash- / emotional grotesquerie – the image // of a black moonbeam, let’s say / prying open the mind’s sarcophagus! – / which only two or three souls // would ever chance to read, let alone / live by, or die for, or adopt / on their syllabus.”
The money thing—it’s all through the book, and even though these poems are about so much more, there is a lot to discover just by examining the work through this specific lens. In the first piece of the collection, Hutchinson asks, “Remember how I died, as a child, from riches? / Poverty, not poetry, brought me back to life.” Two pages later, “Who doesn’t want to know / … if they’ve become insane / in the vicinity of riches?” In the poem “Treason Season” he shows us his “… reinvented days of the week // Sundress, Money, Tulip, Weiner dog, Thyroid, Famine, Satirize”.
Even when not directly referring to cold hard cash, ill-gotten gains or hereditary riches, Lost Signal carries an undercurrent of financialization. In the poem “Meanwhile, Myrmidons” we get one of Hutchinson’s striking images: “Clouds float by / like the distracted thoughts / of underpaid lab technicians.” Are they distracted because they’re underpaid? Does their underpayment spur disengagement from their work? Are their minds full of money worries, how to pay the bills?
In the wonderfully titled piece “Loneliness Is a Condition Institutionally Created and Instated to Control and Subdue the Populace” (after which, really, the poem itself is just a bonus), we read: “The faces of our mother / implicit inside / the faces of our father // whose sanitized hands wield / bright metallic financial / instruments.” Now I’m not entirely sure what’s going on in those lines, and the next stanza warns, “At the pinnacle of distress / we understand this analogy / speaks only for itself.” So perhaps we just allow ourselves to feel its eeriness without trying to make exact sense of it, much as our lives can fail to quite make sense in a world distorted by monetary values. Or perhaps this is to be read literally, that the analogy is selfish, speaking only to further its own aims of getting ahead by getting itself written down, read, and quoted in a review.
Here we have the magic of Lost Signal, a book that resists certainties, denying that its meanings can ever be entirely found. In that gap of puzzlement is delight. What cannot be found cannot be bought, sold, branded or assigned value in a market. Hutchinson cracks open a little space in which to be free.
About the Author
Chris Hutchinson is the author of four previous poetry books, as well as the autofictive verse-novel Jonas in Frames. He has lived all over North America—from Dawson City, Yukon, to Brooklyn, New York—working as a line cook and, more recently, teaching creative writing to undergraduates. He is now a permanent faculty member of the English Department at MacEwan University, located on Treaty 6 Territory.
About the Reviewer
Dawn Macdonald lives in Whitehorse, Yukon, where she grew up without electricity or running water. She won the 2025 Canadian First Book Prize for her poetry collection Northerny. She posts weekly at Reviews of Books I Got for Free or Cheap (on Substack), as well as reviewing for journals and for The Seaboard Review.
Book Details
Publisher : Palimpsest Press
Publication date : May 20 2025
Language : English
Print length : 80 pages
ISBN-10 : 1990293913
ISBN-13 : 978-1990293917
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