Asbestos Heights

If you tore off the tops of canola —
yellow canola flowers — would you
jump in a tub of canola margarine
just 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 note­books 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 working­class belvedere of Asbestos Heights.

Among the refreshing lemon­lime sodas of the world and the rousing lyrics to ‘Bootylicious,’ Asbestos Heights amps up McGimpsey’s trademark sideswiping of formal 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, poetry-wise, and I''ll stand on John Ashbery''s coffee table in my cowboy boots and say that.'' — Michael Robbins

David McGimpsey is the author of several books of poetry and short fiction. His poetry has been shortlisted for the Governor General''s Literary Award and the A.M. Klein Prize. He is also a musician, a fiction editor for Joyland, and his travel writing is a regular feature of enRoute magazine. He lives in Montréal, where he teaches creative writing and literature at Concordia University.