Shane Rhodes is a Canadian poet.
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He graduated from the University of New Brunswick.[1] He lives in Ottawa, Canada.
As the 2008 winner of the Lampman-Scott Award for Poetry, Shane Rhodes turned over half of the $1,500 prize money to the Wabano Centre for Aboriginal Health, a First Nations health centre, according to a 2008 report by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. "Taking that money wouldn't have been right," Rhodes said. The CBC reported that Rhodes felt "Scott's legacy as a civil servant overshadows his work as a pioneer of Canadian poetry."[2]
Shane Rhodes takes a lot of poetic risks in The Wireless Room (NeWest 2000). Rhodes is not governed by any one style, form, language, or theme; he is about variation, innovation, intelligence, and electricity.[4]
About Rhodes' The Bindery, his third book, a Canadian Literature review states:
Part travelogue, part genealogy, part guide to Latin-American commerce, part cabinet of wonder—the poems in Shane Rhodes’ The Bindery are “replete with historical rhyme” (“The Market Place”). The anchor of the book is the title poem, a polysemic catalogue that unfolds in 99 sections, moving from a grandfather escaping the “unneeded attention of gods” on his birthday, to the renovated pastoral of “Arcadia, / lashed / to the lamp post!” Rhodes explores the resonances and dissonances of cultural, physical, and emotional rhyme. Whatever is bound together (family, history, economies) inevitably escapes such binds. This is a book about the semiotics of travel, between territories and bodies, between aesthetics and ethics: “For the Mexican bus driver who stopped in the middle of a busy street and, with an array of honks and complicated hand gestures, made a date with the woman working cash at a convenience store” (“On Travel”). Rhodes’ inventive poems travel between different forms (prose poem, catalogue, anaphora, to name but a few) at once employing the luminous descriptive resources of the lyric and also subverting the totality of any finished picture, any final destination. The metaphorical leaps, the paratactic contingencies in these poems reinforce not only the affective materiality of travel in unfamiliar places but also the difficulty with which language travels to and from the referent—the words we bind and that bind us. The Bindery is Rhodes’ third book and builds on the considerable accomplishments of his earlier works The Wireless Room and Holding Pattern. This is a book worth taking along on any trip.[5]