Asbestos Heights by David Mcgimpsey, Paperback | Indigo Chapters

Winner of the 2015 Quebec Writers' Federation's A. M. Klein Prize for PoetryIf you tore off the tops of canola -yellow canola flowers - would youjump in a tub of canola margarinejust to make the best of despair?Implored by concerned readers to be 'classy' and 'real' for once, David McGimpsey has composed a sequence of canonical noteíbooks on all things 'poetic' and 'poetical.' Birds! Flowers! History! Sad leaders! The word 'aubade'! They're all here, in a serial, State Fair-bound collection of lyrics set in the workingí-class belvedere ofàAsbestos Heights. Among the refreshing lemon-ílime sodas of the world and the rousing lyrics to 'Bootylicious,'àAsbestos Heightsàamps up McGimpsey's trademark sideswiping offormal rhetoric and prosody with pop savoir faire to �*nd his boldest collection. Imagine Petrarch in a Tweet war about where to buy a good pair of dad jeans. Imagine Yeats but with a lot fewer swans. Imagine a poet who was told long ago that nothing good ever comes out of a place like Asbestos Heights.'David McGimpsey is unfuckwithable, poetryíwise, and I'll stand onàJohn Ashbery's coffee table in my cowboy boots and say that.'- Michael Robbins'McGimpsey's book is a masterful display of formal unity ... The work addresses the devalued currency of the overeducated, but underemployed, poet of art-culture, juxtaposing this experience with the esteemed currency of the undereducated, but overemployed, star of pop-culture ... It is also a book of significant pathos and submerged emotion.'- QWF A. M. Klein Poetry Prize jury citation | Asbestos Heights by David Mcgimpsey, Paperback | Indigo Chapters