Sachiko Murakami discusses the work of a.rawlings on the Globe and Mail's In Other Words blog

Wide Slumber for Lepidopterists by a.rawlings asks the question, what would a lepidopterist obsessed by her subject (moths and butterflies) dream about? As the poems stretch through conditions of sleep – some common, some pathological, like apnea – subject and material swirl together ... The physicality of the book (which won an Alcuin Award for Design) is ... unfortunately, lost on the web. The illustrations by Matt Ceolin of specimen jars, moths and other minutiae that lurk in the dreams of a lepidopterist haunt the book, and rawlings' poems also make use of every inch of the page: Some words spread their wings, some splay across the page in the tumult of sleep. But we will, somehow, make do.

Sleep apnea is the temporary cessation of breathing during sleep, and it is during this poem that the interruptions of sleep start invading the text. These interruptions I would call “unsense” rather than “nonsense” because while interruptions like “coalescethe#flightsimplode” don’t “make sense” it is this interruption of sense that is their point; dreams don’t “make sense”, either. This is the beginning of the unwinding of the waking “sense” of language in the book, leaving the familiar lyric tropes of image and narrative towards a more sonic and visual embodiment of the text. While you may see this as an “experimental” poem, it is not an ungenerous one. Its fairly simple premise – a shortage of breath affects the text – opens the way for poems like “Deep Slumber”, which, in one night’s sleep, is two full pages of lines like “xxx y zzz xxx y zzz xxx y zzz xxx y zzz” with “thorax” and “cervix” sprinkled throughout; and, in another instance of “Deep Slumber”, the page is sparsely populated with lines like “fl. sh. st. lu” and “sl. ch. sp. li.” Form and function are deeply intertwined in this text, and reading it – especially aloud – is fun. Not surprisingly, Wide Slumber has since been adapted for the stage, and rawlings continues to engage with readers and nonreaders of poetry alike in various incarnations of its performance.