"And then you think of her with her eyes brimming, the both of you standing dumb in the foyer of the friendship centre, holding eyes, not hands."

"This spring made winter an insulting opening offer, now the passing lane is getting harder to negotiate, thawing out and icing up again."

"Life in Canada is just bear attack after bear attack. It always happens, as incalculable as the number of times Irving Layton used the word 'loins.'"

Pull his finger. Braid his chest hair. Top of the odd-job totem pole. King of the all-you-can-eat.

"I’ve been wanting to write about the black skirt we’ve been using to cover the lovebird’s cage. The goodnight skirt."

"Now you are looking up from the bottom of the lake. You are walking past the townhouses in April under the budding trees, and drowning."

"Your poem should look pretty and shut up. Your poem should have a boner. Your poem should smell like a wax museum or jail."

Peter Culley's wet June days in Nanaimo: damp carpet, dead walnut trees, the roar of the highway, Rockford and the last bees on Planet Earth.

my blood has blessed these sidewalkslonger than the waters of Misipawistik have washed my village

"Tired of living, your sail shredded by your ruined nails"

he historian who writes potboiler novels replete w/ racial stereotypes / the wildlife biologist who chases bears from the staff parking lot

"The phrase totally underplays the impact of having your lovely red Alero T-boned by a guy in a white Mazda with incredibly low mileage on his life."

Claire Caldwell's advice on dealing with bears: "speak quietly but with conviction. Never let them smell your Ativan."

Bobby returns from the war with a box-camera snapshot of boys drowning in greatcoats.

he played injun in gods country where boys proved themselves clean / dumb beasts who could cut fire out of the whitest sand

"So you come, stinking to high heaven with all the foulness of your worn-out stories—je me souviens."

"In this poem my father is not drunk. He does not phone me this December night and beg me to invite him for Christmas."

Canmore is carved out for war destroyers, celebrities and Cool Runnings in Stevie Howell's poem from Geist's latest issue.

"Who gives a fuck about an Oxford comma?" and more inquiries into life's finer points, by Ford Pier.

Sucking marrow from his chicken bones, spitting the splinters on the rim of a white china plate.

A rolling moose gathers no moss.