Poetry
Brushfires
…some skeletal remains initially thought to be single bodies were actually two people fused together by searing temperatures. —cnn, February 12, 2009 There are always bodies to discover at each …
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Dying in Winnipeg
Don’t read me wrong— I plan on dying in Winnipeg In a strange way I posit Winnipeg is where everything always dies: Grandfathers, clock radios, Chevrolets faith, journalists, fine-tip pens …
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Cottage Country
10-cane rum and I’m all sun inside. Children in shrink-wrap-tight swimsuits. Cigar boats burning by. Our aluminum’s hoist-high in dry-dock, tonsilled in the mouth of the boathouse, its conked outboard …
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My Second, Less Popular, and Even Less Critically Successful Canadian Novel
The description / of exquisite unsaids. The turn will not / take place in an Applebee’s parking lot
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My Life as a Canadian Writer
If you heard that segment of Canada Reads / where a guy recommends the novel version / of Tom Cruise’s Top Gun, that was me
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The Newfoundland orphange playground and asleep in the stiff nunnery’s bed, the train was stalled at Portage and Main— “Just around then my marriage fell apart.” The pea garden was …
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Sin of Omission
The priest was Haitian and unpopular, sent from Halifax to lift the church’s sinking numbers. Someone made a joke about colonialism. Someone made a joke about how he choked on …
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Dear Updike
I dreaded those future aeons when I would not be present—an endless succession of days I would miss, with their own news and songs and styles of machine. —John Updike, …
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I Am Happy to Live in an Age of Plenty
There are more non-prescription painkillers now than when most of us had jobs that were strenuous or fatal. Our muscles tightened and frayed like ropes that hoist pianos; our knuckles …
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