Chris Hutchinson's ​Lost Signal

Reviewed by Terry Trowbridge

(Palimpsest Press, 2025)

Political poetry

Lost Signal is a collection of 40 poems by Chris Hutchinson, published in 2025 by the Windsor, Ontario-based publisher Palimpsest Press. Hutchinson’s author bio says that he is currently an English Department faculty member at MacEwan University in Edmonton, Alberta (Treaty 6 Territory), and also reveals that he has worked as a line cook in cities across North America, from Dawson City to Brooklyn, New York. The writing voice in Lost Signal more often takes the perspective of a line cook in Brooklyn than the perspective of the tenure track by establishing an expansive mood of ambivalent alienation in blue-collar working locations across the continent.

But this is not a book only about the abstract aesthetics of twenty-first-century life. At its core, Lost Signal contains political poems that can be used to better understand major American political events of 2025 as experienced by working-class individuals, including, or maybe in particular, the election of Zohran Mamdani. Hutchinson does write some poems about Canada, but his primary audience seems to be readers in the USA. It is in the context of American people, places, and politics that he offers the most granular attention to ambiguities.

Since it was published in 2025, readers can infer that the poems in Lost Signal were written, and the manuscript accepted by Palimpsest Press, before Donald Trump’s election in 2024, and were published soon after his inauguration at the start of this year. The timing of the poems is therefore an indicator of their usefulness as observations that describe working class socioeconomic sensibilities that preceded the official electoral campaign movement to resist the Trump administration after his election. With that in mind, Lost Signal is not (at least not now) primarily about “the adaptability of language” and “semantic shifts” that the back of the book blurbs. Rather, it is a more specific political text. It is a book of anthropological observations made in Canada and the USA. The titular poem on the first page, “Lost Signal,” was obviously meant to provide a framework for interpreting the poems as aesthetic and biographical. The long piece “This is Not a Poem” is a competitor as the key for reading the entire book; as an apologetics for Democratic Socialism as self-realization; and as a poetics of the anomie that constrains American workers in an illiberal democracy.

The poem “Lost Signal” presents the private thoughts of a narrator who is walking railway tracks alone but hyperaware that their smartphone connects them to the world. How alone are they? Railway tracks are a ubiquitous trail that Canadians and Americans both use to walk in privacy. They are dangerous and illegal to walk on, but most of us get away with it; and that means they are off-limits enough to be a private space even in crowded cities.

Cell tower technology, though, nullifies the privacy by maintaining constant communication. The narrator reflects on how he cannot truly communicate with somebody, but he can communicate with his phone; that person can then communicate with their phone, and there is a cellular system between them: “You’re just radio waves./I’m the touch of a touchscreen/away. Please reply before I fall asleep.” With communication technology, the users are spoiled for choice about when and how to initiate contact or reply. People are never impossible to contact, but they are mediated, communicating with the phone, and not directly available as the sender-receiver of texts.

The poem is about memories and a need to be validated by friends or family or co-workers: “Ping…from decades down the tracks.” It is a poem about being lost in interstices of “Empire” and being forced to into an adult life of wage labour instead of authentic creativity: “Remember how I died, as a child, from riches?/Poverty, not poetry, brought me back to life.” The book’s major themes are encapsulated by articulating commonly shared experiences of digital communications and the ways working class individuals experience space.

“This is Not a Poem” is ironically titled, not unlike the song title “This is Not a Love Song”, either by Public Image Ltd. (1992) or by Nouvelle Vague (2004). If so, the irony of the title reinforces the dramatic distance between twenty-first-century interpersonal relationships, cut apart by communication devices and shiftwork hours. The poem contrasts that reality with an imagined alternative of creativity and unstructured curiosity. Each stanza involves multiple layers of irony.

Hutchinson begins the poem by introducing a mythologized past when the world was made of sumptuous materials: “[Earth] this blue white-streaked marble/drifting between the sun’s shivering gold/and the moon’s fiery silver”. It is a past when creativity could be realized, “like Van Gogh’s cypresses through night’s wilding stars,” and altered states of consciousness were easily, innocently, induced: “tripping the channel between desire and pleasure”. Hutchinson puts that mythic world in the remote past, but a past that is a kind of legacy that people are entitled to internalize as a birthright: “we, our unborn souls like translucent green-winged butterflies, got away with (almost) everything!”

Here in the present, though, is where the Brooklyn line cook of our historical moment presents the political vocabulary of our time. Hutchinson names “Democratic Socialism” as the kind of justice that youths know: “Other than growing/taller and stronger…committed to truth/beauty and revolutionary/Democratic Socialism – what else is there?” Hutchinson does two things at once. He advances the role of Democratic Socialism as a full-fledged ideology that describes how the ideal creative world can be manifested in our current world. On the other hand, “what else is there?” also demonstrates the limited political vocabulary of young adults. Of course there is more. But the point is that Democratic Socialism is the zeitgeist that visionaries know right now. The revolutionary optimism of youth is quickly rebuffed by the world. He follows up with, ‘Too soon our green naivete/cracks like a seed’s husk”.

The poem continues to mythologize the tragic life of a worker in American capitalism. Growing up is a process for the working-class soul to “transmigrate our wilderness contracts/to a cultivated career/our hours and days/to a series of teeth-clenching chores.” He names the injustice as, “Our life [made] ancillary [to being] defined/by what makes the world go ‘round.” The hourly wage turns the person into an industrial chore-doing wage earner. Hutchinson sees the economic decay of creative minds: “More adverb than verb/our mind./More adjective than noun/our body,” And Hutchinson goes on to contrast the demands of capitalist wage labour on the intergenerational relationships of family politics and artistry. Death stops, for example, his father, whose “art and politics/has quieted./The lights and shadows/of his truths, half-truths,/and well-meaning lies/have fled,” and although Hutchinson inherited his father’s narratives, because of his job and menial tasks, he must ask, “What have I forsaken?” Although he is asking himself, clearly, he is also asking the reader to consider the question.

That consideration puts Democratic Socialism back in the center of the poems. Hutchinson writes with the sort of sociological imagination C. Wright Mills envisioned for ordinary people to locate their lives in social forces operating at systemic levels. If Hutchinson is writing for academics, he was writing for the researchers who are familiar with Durkheim and anomie. The poems were written before 2025; in the meantime, Democratic Socialism has become the rallying cry for the practical program by which ordinary working-class people can mobilize politically and achieve much more of the creative life that Hutchinson fears is lost to mere myth. Zohran Mamdani, AOC, Ilhan Omar, Bernie Sanders, are the international representatives of Social Democracy. Brooklyn line cooks are electing them and making a spirited attempt to bring the theory to life. Hutchinson’s poetry is documentary evidence of the aesthetic and critical theoretical levels of Democratic Socialism internalized before, and during, the election campaigns of 2024.

Probably, therefore, Lost Signal will soon be on a list of Moms for America’s banned books in the USA. Palimpsest Press is perfectly positioned in Windsor to smuggle copies over the Detroit, Michigan border. They should. This is a book that is capable of mobilizing Americans. Conversely, Canada has become a refuge for American scholars. Ironcically, the Canadian news focuses on the expat faculty joining the University of Toronto, where marquee names like Tomothy Snyder make headlines, even though U of T is the most arch-conservative center of far-right power, for both small-c neoliberals and big-C Conservatives, in Canada (save for their progressive enclave, OISE). Canadian media neglects to mention the oxymoron that is Americans fleeing MAGA for a job at the institution that fussed and coddled professor Jordan Peterson. Those Americans who have fled to Canada should consider rallying around Hutchinson’s text and its border-crossing American politics. He should be attending conferences and podcasts wherever there are American expats, and the expats clearly can find a synthesis of Canada and the USA underway at MacEwan University. And, importantly, Lost Signal is a cross-border synthesis concerned with the sociological imagination of citizenship, political economy, and a complete rejection of the forces behind annexation.

To that end, there are several notable political poems. For example, “What I Want Isn’t Always What I Want” claims that doing philosophy and history are worthwhile, and rejects socioeconomic programs undertaken by powers who would defund Humanities and Fine Arts in universities, libraries, museums, art galleries. Hutchinson rejects DOGE and eschews LLMs, it seems, by revealing that what is totalitarian in their products is the fact that their status as cybernetic tools is sidelined in favour of downsizing public- and private-sector critical thinking. American techbros seek to replace philosophy, and Hutchinson rejects their claim that statistically-juiced autocomplete can do it, decrying them with, “No more probable knowledge/automated systems/of thought, the human mind entrained/by that which claims to be the end/of want, of shame, of history.”

Other political poems are obvious by their self-explanatory titles: “The Dying Art of Healthcare”, “Dear Futurist, I’m a Futurist Too, In Spirit”, the always-popular “Loneliness is a Condition Institutionally Created and Instated to Control and Subdue a Populace”, and “Listen, Believe, Obey” are all poems that could be potent magic in the hands of community organizers.
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Lost Signal is not entirely made of manifestos, declamations, and jeremiads, drawn from Hutchinson’s own mind and spun into theory. He is concerned with specific places in the USA and Canada. He crafts composite characters who belong in those places, who weather the social forces he observes in their culturally localized ways. Lost Signal is a book of social geography. It is worthwhile to consider that some of the poems are relevant to studying those places. They ought to be read, or shared, or mobilized for social change there, where they belong. A quick list of places in the USA and Canada follows.

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Canadian Places
 
The poem “Hope (Vancouver 2003-2023)” begins with a quote from American poet Emily Dickinson, rather than a Canadian Vancouverite like Susan Musgrave or Catherine Owen. Perhaps that is just part of the transnational synthesis. Hutchinson reflects on years of his life in places like “Mayor’s sky-blue, blood-pimpled dumpsters,” the Salish Sea, and Eastvan, where the “motherland of Marxist apologists” coexists with “track-marked” social disorder and ancient presences like “prehistoric mountains/like green white-capped waves.” Hutchinson’s Vancouver is both nostalgic and a place of “money and wasted pain forever/and never away.” A reader might compare Hutchinson’s vision to books like Andrew MacLeod’s A Better Place on Earth: The Search for Fairness in Super Unequal British Columbia (2015), or Lee Maracle’s My Conversations with Canadians (2017).

“Obscurity” is about imperialism, anomie, alienation, and boredom in Burnaby, British Columbia. Hutchinson juxtaposes the historic vanities of Napoleon Bonaparte with the in-vain, contrived consumerism of condominium life.

“Elongated, Waterworn Sonnet” is set in Millcreek Ravine (presumably Edmonton’s water feature). This poem is a fantasy, a romance, a diversion in both senses of diverting water and leisure.

“How I Ended Up on the Shores of Labrador” recounts a comedy of navigational errors during a cross-Canada road trip. Places mentioned include the Rockies, Red Deer, Crossfield, Medicine Hat, and of course Labrador. The places, and small foibles of an unreliable car, are paired with funny conversations between friends. Notably, though, one conversation is, “Am I or am I not the Steve Buscemi/of Canadian poetry?” Therein the poem reveals, maybe on purpose, maybe by accident, that the status and values of Canadian landmarks are just as immediately and intimately understood by Canadians as the careers and connotations of American popular culture figures.

“The Spell of The Yukon (2001)” begins with the division between rural and urban, Nordic and Manhattan: “Where was New York when I found myself living in a nylon tent outside Dawson City, …?” Hutchinson records a Yukon River boisterous with sounds and populated by characters, proving that unique persons and busy places exist outside of NYC, and they are just as alive, and real. Hutchinson admits, “I loved New York, and longed for all its geniuses and Bedlamites…even though, at this stage in my peripatetic career, I’d never laid eyes on the city except for the ten thousand times it had appeared on tv.”
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Even so, this poem which records a longing to visit one of the world’s imperial metropoles also reminds the reader that the rural, northern, even remote places are just as conducive for art and theory: “And at the base of a serpentine birch tree I awoke with all the eloquence of a stone.” The metropolis can sometimes be a distraction instead of an inspiration, and is by no means the only place to make theory, even theory about the city itself. (Missing from this poem is the acknowledgement that half the scenes of NYC on television and in movies are scenes of Vancouver, the other half are from Toronto, and the remaining fractions are scenes of Hamilton, and sometimes, rarely, American depictions of NYC are actually scenes of NYC).

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American Places
 
The poem “Treason Season” repudiates the “filthy Floridian” who directed seditions from the safety of Mar-A-Lago. The poem “Waving from the Shores of Key West” further analyzes Florida as a new, unstable geopolitical world capital, albeit one that is still contested space, ideologically.

“Six Little Hymn-like Jokes to the Night” names the Statue of Liberty in NYC, and Las Vegas and surrounding saguaro forest, as well as vaguely alluding to other sites. The Statue of Liberty is compared and contrasted with a panopticon prison tower: “Nighttime is my time/to paint these prison walls…light the black candle/of this panopticon tower, make it blaze/like lady liberty’s torch.” Prisoners write poetry. In a rapidly enclosing surveillance society and police state, everyone’s sensation of being imprisoned, and everyone’s sensation of writing verse to survive incarceration, must necessarily begin to subtly affect their semantics, vocabulary, what prompts them to communicate. Las Vegas appears as an allegory for capitalist urges: “my overflowing desire for a little more/of everything – prestige, power/the Las Vegas slot machine jingle/which is the sound/of my own name”. Hutchinson plays with social capital and personhood.

“And What of the Fleshy Contents of My Skull?” is a complicated and long poem about egoism. But to the extent that Project 2025 is a political program for patriarchal capitalism and Christian nationalism, Hutchinson makes an interesting point about power through Christian idioms: “ever since the morning Adam/first awoke, feeling denotative, proprietary/and vaguely American – how, before he begot,/or bit of the fruit, his mouth was already full/of wordly appellations.”  This poem also mentions the North Saskatchewan River and decolonizes it somewhat, in contrast with proprietary names: “kisiskaciwani-sipy into the ‘North Saskatchewan River’/curtailing its content of syllables…But this is not your river/and not your place/to say, the clouds are whispering”.

“Event Horizon” is a love poem. Hutchinson practices the male gaze, gazing at someone who is deciding how to love him in words. Somehow, the poem finds its way to “So yes, maybe you exist/(by which I mean Jesus lives in Tulsa/Oklahoma at the corner of Quincy Ave./and Route 66),” which is as good a place as any for a love poem to cite. Thereby the poem also becomes a poem of skepticism, “and maybe it’s me who’s make-believe – a literally fictitious citizen of the world” in layers of citizenship, romantic relationship, and the instability of social scripts.

“Breakfast at the Armoy Hotel in Bozeman, Montana” happily appreciates country-western kitsch culture. It’s hard to tell if Hutchinson is setting up a scene like the country-western bar in Blues Brothers, or a more sincere affection for places that the American imagination longs for when they dedicate mass-market, but still-sacred, homages like Cracker Barrel.

“According to the Art of Hunger” retells the mythic relationship between the social dimensions of poverty and NYC’s Liberty Island. Hutchinson articulates the civic function of monuments and their representation of improvement, contrasted with the ironic reality that whatever statement monuments make, they do not, alone, solve poverty. This is doubly emphasized when monuments are utterly vulnerable to vandalism: “Another plinth gets vandalized/by billowing sail-shaped shadows, but then/it’s too late. Liberty Island turns red.”
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“Untitled in a World Called Money, Beauty, Fame” is a character sketch of a stereotypical American man, in the deeply fraught tradition of T. S. Eliot’s Prufrock and Blur’s Charmless Man. This poem could be fashioned into a one-act play, a music video, a dance drama, an Edward Gorey-style comic strip. Along the way, Hutchinson specifies, “the empty parking lots of eastern Massachusetts,” but like the Canadian locations in his road trip to Labrador, the implications of those parking lots are probably an idiomatic local thing.

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Found Signal
 
Ultimately, Lost Signal could be used to build ideological bridges between American expats and Canadians living in the shadows of Mar-A-Lago and Project 2025. More importantly, though, Lost Signal could be a mobilization tool for community organizers, librarians, progressive faith-based organizations, poetry slams, politics podcasts, and grassroots election campaigns. Furthermore, the relationship between the societies in Canada and the USA is undergoing extreme conditions of social engineering. It seems like our intercultural communication is completely controlled by White House staff, and that Canada’s reaction has been exclusively an economic restructuring taken on by government cabinet ministers. Lost Signal is a book that can become a nucleus for Canadian cultural workers to lead the new North American relationship and define it on Canadian terms, between ordinary people rather than politicos and wonks. Lost Singal must become part of Canada’s social engineering project. Let us hope that Chris Hutchinson’s signal is found, amplified, and broadcast widely, sometimes secretly, and effectively.

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​Pushcart Prize nominee, researcher & farmer Terry Trowbridge’s poems are in Pennsylvania Literary Journal, Carousel, Lascaux Review, Kolkata Arts, Leere Mitte, untethered, Snakeskin Poetry, Progenitor, Miracle Monocle, Orbis, Pinhole, Big Windows, Muleskinner, Brittle Star, Mathematical Intelligencer, Journal of Humanistic Mathematics, New Note, Hearth and Coffin, Synchronized Chaos, Indian Periodical, Delta Poetry Review, Literary Veganism and ~100 more. His lit crit is in BeZine, Erato, Amsterdam Review, Ariel, British Columbia Review, Hamilton Arts & Letters, Episteme, Studies in Social Justice, Rampike, Seeds, and The /t3mz/ Review.  His Erdös number is 5. Terry is grateful to the Ontario Arts Council for his first 2 writing grants.