Check out this raw and insightful collection from award-winning author and poet Michael Trussler.

Michael Trussler, a Saskatchewan resident and professor at the University of Regina, is the award-winning author of poems, short stories, and creative non-fiction works. His essay collection, The Sunday Book, won the 2023 Saskatchewan Book Award in the Non-fiction category for its brilliant use of memoir as a medium to explore life at all speeds. 10:10 is his seventh book, and like some of his previous collections, it takes on a heavy topic in a climate where we all need to address it. 

Released last month, 10:10 is Trussler’s latest work. It has been in progress for decades, nearly the entire length of his career as an author. The piece is experimental and innovative, acting as a commentary on the state of the world, and posing questions that many of us ask in times of hopelessness. 

How can violence and beauty coexist? How can a world as cruel as ours hold such vast wonders?

He’s sought answers to these questions for nearly his entire life, driven by his curiosity and desire to understand the world. 

When he was 18, Trussler went on a backpacking trip to Europe where he came across the Stedelijk in Amsterdam, a world-renowned modern art museum that changed the course of his life.

He recounts the moment he came across The Beanery, an exhibition by Edward Kienholz that struck him so deeply it inspired the title of his book nearly 30 years later. It features patrons of a bar losing time to the allures of alcohol, each of their faces replaced with a clock stuck at 10:10. 

Trussler says that, as someone who has struggled with depression and substance abuse in the past, Kienholz’s work opened his life up to him.

 “What he (Kienholz) meant was that, when you drink too much …, time doesn’t really exist. You’re sort of caught up in this, this loop of 10:10.” He explains. 

When he re-visited the exhibit later on in life, he looked back on his first exposure to The Beanery as a teenager and realized that he hadn’t actually understood the depth of the work and its meaning. Only that, as a kid from a small town in Southern Ontario, it was liberating. It represented something larger than the individual— something that, as someone confined to the culture of a small town, he had never really encountered before.

He didn’t realize until decades later, that Kienholz’s installation had been a catalyst to nearly all of his works. Lying dormant in his mind, The Beanery was an inspiration that changed the way he thought about the world. 

Trussler says that 10:10 is unlike any of his other books. Having written it on and off for as long as he has, years and years, it is the work that is most organically him. He takes great joy in the fact that publishing and books as an art have changed and that he can express nuance in experimental, avant-garde ways that weren’t possible when he first began writing.

His essays are gripping and real, thoughts splayed across pages that everyone can relate to. With a keen interest in visual art, he implements his own photography as well as other visual mediums in 10:10 to give his audience an insight into the scope of the duality of the world around us. He uses emails, imagined interviews, and high art to drive the message home. 

Trussler has the masterful ability of being able to write from various perspectives in a meaningful way, and 10:10 is an excellent example of his skill. He presents eye-opening juxtapositions that leave you reflecting on the topic at hand, wondering how exactly the world can offer both bird-watching and genocide. He offers unique and hard-hitting commentary on the tumultuous balance between the world’s beauty and its callousness, his poems both graceful and striking. 

His works reflect on the duality of humanity and nature, how art coexists with war and creation with destruction. It’s a stunning collection that pits nature against modernity, highlighting instances of natural beauty against the violence and climate anxiety we find inherent to our lives in today’s day and age. 

“One minute Trussler is singing the praises of lyric poetry, the next he is sharing the reckoning of knowledge and dreams. What an unusual, mixed media; simply said, there is magnificence here,” wrote Barry Dempster, author of Being Here: the chemistry of startle.

Trussler’s vivid and compelling imagery has a way of getting in your head and staying there, leaving you to reflect on how exactly you see the world around you. His lyrical prose, paired with the mixed visual media he utilizes, is fluid and gripping. He engages with the topics at hand in a way that opens your eyes. 

10:10 presents humanity and the world in all their glory—magnificent and off-putting.

With the current state of the world, it is easy to find ourselves lost in its cruelty, but Trussler does a splendid job of giving his audience a new perspective. The world is whole, and in that wholeness, we will find both wonders and flaws. It’s what we do with the information presented to us, how we dissect it and how we shape our lives around it that matters. 

Letting ourselves succumb to the horrors only adds to them. Admitting defeat to the cruelty this world has to offer is to shun the vast wonders we have at our fingertips.

What value is there in despair? Why give in to the grief that destruction brings us when the world has so much more to offer? Why not oppose the destruction? Why not protect what we do have?

Why focus on the shadows when there is light above us?

Don’t let yourselves get stuck in the loop that is 10:10. Act. 

Michael Trussler’s 10:10 poses questions that lead to hundreds more. This collection is a testament to his skill, and his ability to look both inward and beyond himself, addressing human context within the Anthropocene and the vastness of it all. If you’re looking for a new book to sink your teeth into this winter, make sure to check out his latest work.