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list price: $18.95
edition:Paperback
category: Poetry
published: May 2017
ISBN:9780889713260
publisher: Nightwood Editions

Bad Ideas

by Michael V. Smith

tagged: canadian, lgbt
Description

Nobody knows bad ideas quite like Michael V. Smith. In his new collection of poetry, he speaks to an intangibility of sense, or a sense beyond the rational. Bad Ideas explores the inevitability of loss and triumph with characteristic irony and tenderness. Through this dazzling collection of a remembered life, hung out to ogle like laundry on the line, Smith recalls a mother who discovers a sex tape, a man who dreams of birthing his own son and a woman who blends her baby girls into milkshakes.

 

Bad Ideas is a testament to how an altered perspective effects change, how stories can be recast. The collection forms itself into an exercise in which optimism is a practiced art recaptured in dreams and prayers and combined to acknowledge the unknowable, the contradictory, the ungraspable: "An evening is composed / in a hundred unchoreographed / dramas"; "I pull a Clark Kent / transform, dressed as a monk / in burgundy and gold robes. I think / this will protect me, but it doesn't"; "Dear Hatred, sweet / Hatred, do you not move our enemies / to know us better?" Hyperbolic and sincere, this collection brawls with the unquantifiable themes of family, loneliness and love.

About the Author

Michael V. Smith

MICHAEL V. SMITH is a writer, performer, and filmmaker. His poetry has been shortlisted for the ReLit Award, his fiction has been shortlisted for the Journey Prize and Amazon Canada First Novel Award, and his queer memoir My Body Is Yours was shortlisted for a Lambda Literary Award. Smith is the winner of a Western Magazine Award, numerous film awards, and the inaugural Dayne Ogilvie Prize from the Writers' Trust of Canada. He is currently a professor in Kelowna, BC, where he lives with his husband on the unceded territory of the Syilx Okanagan people.

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