Nightmarker

There's an automatic impulse within the human species, the way its cities spring up all over the planet just as ant colonies do. Humans reproduce by way of towns and metropolises, replicating the bee-dances of the Romans, Greeks, and Babylonians, unconsciously invoking rituals of the past in tranceful reveries of the future.

In expeditions to City Hall, the police station, the sugar refinery, and the courthouse, Nightmarker explores the human city as an animal behaviour, a museum, and a dream of modernity. It also records the journey of Geo, an earth-geist, who struggles to comprehend humanity's siege of Earth while enabling us to examine the human condition, bound as it is by the drive to evolve, multiply, and simply exist.

audio

  Discovery at Sea 7

  Bird City

  Queen Dreams

reviews

Meridith Quartermain's Nightmarker engages with the layers of the city in its historical forms, but also in everyday moments and its reveries on the future.  It is epic in scope ... a poetic force 'raging with life' "  —Straight.com

"Quatermain's experiments in undoing the knot of human understanding forces us to ask questions like 'what would Canada mean to Pangaea?' ... undercutting our sense of ourselves as animals imbued with anything to set up apart from the remainder of infinity."  —Dalhousie Review

"Quartermain provides an ambitious and compelling model for the poetic exploration of urban space." —Canadian Literature
Click here for the full review.

awards

> Shortlisted for the Vancouver Book Award