Natalee Caple made quite a splash with her first two books, The Heart is its Own Reason, a short-story collection from Insomniac Press, and The Plight of Happy People in an Ordinary World, a novel from House of Anansi Press. With A More Tender Ocean Caple turns her hand to poetry, and the results are no less dazzling. The poems were written using a Surrealist technique called automatic writing -- a kind of poetic impressionism after speed-reading. The effect is a kind of dreamlike state -- everything isn't quite as it should be, as though it had all been seen through the facet of a diamond. The poems are lyrical, erotic, gentle, happy, sad and strangely beautiful. A More Tender Ocean is unusual but immensely moving and compelling, tender but not maudlin. 'What goes on seems ordinary,' writes Caple. Rest assured, it is not.
