Praise for Joe Denham's previous work:
Denham is as comfortable with the daily violence--psychic and actual--of urban life as he is with the small-town world of boats and lines in the water. Junkies and garbage strikes are as strikingly, and lovingly, depicted as 'a lakeshore lined with alder, maple, fir.' The pastoral is juxtaposed against a world "ripped on caffeine ... lush on home wine and the perfume of a young woman."
--Quill & Quire
With a lyric intensity refreshingly free of pop pyrotechnics, Joe Denham's poems pull compelling music from work, love and grief.
--John Pass
Joe Denham's first book, Flux, opens with graphic, empathetic work poetry. Almost every line reverberates with layered alliteration, assonance, consonance ... extended in frequent imagery of music. A short long poem remembering his native Sechelt Peninsula urges alerting ourselves to the slow things that define the lure of the local.
--Canadian Literature
Rather than a collection of standalone lyrics, the five untitled sections spin an extended meditation on work, the environment, and humanity, on the sacred and the profane. [Denham] weds the active to the contemplative and eschews pat moralizing and trendy poses, resulting in poetry complex enough to mirror the contradictions and ambivalences of life. Throughout this collection, [he] evinces an awareness that solid craftsmanship is one possible antidote to conspicuous consumption and waste. One thing is for sure: this is no disposable book. I can't recommend it highly enough.
--Zachariah Wells, Quill & Quire
Windstorm is extremely well-informed in its project: an extended praise-song/elegy for the ocean and enunciation of those who have contributed to its ruin. ... Sometimes working in terza rima, the rhyming three-line form created by Dante, sometimes in sonnets, sometimes in free verse, Denham repeats lines and images, but the repetition works. Windstorm is a book you lean into; its combination of passion for subject matter and hard-earned craft is almost enough to bowl a reader over.
--Winnipeg Free Press
Easily the most under-discussed book of the year. An important moment for Denham, I think, moving from a way of looking and hearing to a more expansive and contemplative vista. This book feels like it's preparing for more.
--Lemon Hound
Windstorm ... speeds through work, pain, love and savage nature. We expect the language of the worker to be simple and concrete, but this book is an anomaly. It is not easily accessible poetry. It is chaotic and fierce, like the weather it describes. However, if you lean into it hard enough you will see the forests swaying and falling, hear the sea rumbling and imagine the many creatures, whales and crustaceans, floating beneath.
--Jan Degrass, Coast Reporter (BC)
