Visual Inspection
Composed over a period of profound illness, Visual Inspection is a searching reflection on poetry, power and our embodied lives. Shaped by matching elements of literary history, poetic practice, contemporary art, politics and ecology with Rader’s own experience of chronic illness and pain, Visual Inspection writes into and through what is accessible to our minds and bodies. Part memoir, part essay, part poetic investigation, the text guides us through kaleidoscopic meditations on disability, access, vision, redaction, pain, illness and death. Set primarily in the central Okanagan, Visual Inspection is a codex of references, artifacts and associations that, taken as whole, revisions access as process and art as experience.
Released 2019
"Matt Rader’s Visual Inspection is an art object, an ethnography of a city, a medical history of a body pitted against itself, and a searching examination of the inscrutability of sense and sensation and, by extension, empathy, politics and creativity. What fascinates me about Rader’s poetic practice is that it is in excess of the page, is against the sovereignty of text, is driven more by worldliness than wordiness, but the writing is nonetheless graceful, collaborative, referential and emotional. This is a combination that holds your attention, that shows you how to attend."
–Billy-Ray Belcourt