Flux

Flux is everything a significant debut should be--the arrival of a fresh, confident voice with an extraordinary range of form, direction and style.

From a sequence that captures the art and vocabulary of commercial fishing with careful precision, Denham bursts into a free-flowing and varied narrative based on the angst-ridden and picaresque life of a hitchhiking, cigarette-scrounging West Coast university student. Between these poles, Flux draws on Denham's broad palette of expression to evoke the various shades of urban life: house fires, street life, garbage strikes, disturbing and life-affirming revelations of young love, and friends and relatives possessed by drugs, child abuse and suicide.

All of this leads to "Two Waters," Denham's brilliant long poem painstakingly laying out the natural beauty and geography of the small coastal town he grew up in and its transformation into "Memories rippling/ On the periphery of vision between clean new buildings . . . Stripmalls. Traffic. Suburbia's/ Low-swell panic moving in . . ."