"lug like trunks,/ steer like plows/ pile like lumber..."

"It’s 6 a.m. when the lights turn on / in a white-washed drugstore, / as if it were a little theatre / shining out onto the sidewalk."

"Had hardwoods and crown moulding / I thought I could afford. I signed the lease, / sick of driving everything I owned"

"On benedick’s retirement, or how I learned to stop worrying and love the catholic church"

"Rita, we are both members / of the fat neo-Scottish diaspora. / Don’t tell me it doesn’t exist, sweet darlin’"

"anything you wanted to keep had to be taken off your balcony / then on that day, Balcony Day / whatever items were still left out there disappeared"

"Canada has no history books, they are being written as we speak by navvies and temporary foreign workers, by strippers and hitchhikers."

"he’s rowing with bed rails on sheets / sail-taut where the sea should be."

Listen to C.R. Gilpin read "The Pump Jack," "The Tall Poppy" and "The NFB Documentary."

"Of course, looking back, you would like to reboot and start over, but there is no over." An excerpt from The Waking Comes Late, winner of the 2016 Governor General’s Literary Award for poetry.

"I’d take the calm before the storm if it meant having any calm whatsofuckingever."

An animated short featuring "Drunken Laundry Day with Charles Bukowski" by Henry Doyle, winner of the Downtown Eastside Writers' Jamboree Writing Contest.

Dear still unpublished writer: Thank you for your submission to generic unprofitable lower-case canadian poetry magazine.

"If I conceive God's child my father will get $500,000 / My father instructs me to pray for this fortune / he could open a second restaurant / a walk-in fridge"

Existential philosophy, gap year blues, retro-modern décor ennui and other problems faced by the upper class.

"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