This work delivers an intricately woven tapestry of fractured recollection, longing, and relentless artistic drive. Drawing thematic inspiration from a mosaic of experiences, from his youth in British Columbia's logging camps to the sweltering summer streets of Montreal in the late '80s and New Westminster's seamy weekly rentals in the early 2000s, Jackson crafts a narrative at once intensely personal, gritty, and transcendent. The journey invites readers to leave the page and traverse both the cityscapes of Canada and the anguished interior of a struggling soul as the protagonist teeters between slow starvation and total isolation.
By interlacing poems, short stories, essays, a meta-autobiographical novel, a three-act play, illustrations, and extensive self-reflective interactions with these media, Jackson offers a multifaceted, intermodal poststructuralist view into the complexities of identity, place, and time. Deeply and ambitiously authentic,
Midnight at the Arcanum
is not content to be a single literary work; it is an overarching examination of itself and the poststructuralist tradition that underlies the work's intricate scaffolding.