He'll - Softcover

Eliding the English language and Plautdietsch, a dialect of German that developed along a delta of the Vistula River in Prussia during the early sixteenth century and spread to the Canadian prairies in the late nineteenth century, hell is an apostrophe to Mennos. Because the mother tongue is unwritten, these poems express the paradox of Anglicizing an obscure vernacular rather than impose inscription onto speech, they evoke Germanic sounds on the page. These fragments of pastoral lyrics and idyllic prose expose an irony of connection and omission: Mennonites relate to each other to their ethnicity, to their religion with a colloquial discourse that isolates them from outsiders.hell addresses the tale of a mailman found dead in a pile of letters he refused to deliver. Roman Dyck was the letter carrier for a Mennonite village located where the prairie sweeps into the Eastern corner of Manitoba. After his demise an anonymous translator and an investigator named Nada interpret the remains of the corpus. The letters themselves compose a posthumous critique of Mennonite ethnicity and religion, both influential in defining who identifies as Menno, but also the reason each generation of Mennos will turn on their inheritance. Every ad from a catalogue, every measure from a hymnal, every ingredient in a recipe every line marks an elegy to Plautdietsch."This is an abundance that invites abundance." Robert Kroetsch

nathan dueck lives in Calgary. His previous work, king's(mere) (2003), interprets William Lyon Mackenzie King's biography with prose poetry.