About BC Books Online
BC Books Online was created for anyone interested in BC-published books, and with librarians especially in mind. We'd like to make it easy for library staff to learn about books from BC publishers - both new releases and backlist titles - so you can inform your patrons and keep your collections up to date.
Our site features print books and ebooks - both new releases and backlist titles - all of which are available to order through regular trade channels. Browse our subject categories to find books of interest or create and export lists by category to cross-reference with your library's current collection.
A quick tip: When reviewing the "Browse by Category" listings, please note that these are based on standardized BISAC Subject Codes supplied by the books' publishers. You will find additional selections, grouped by theme or region, in our "BC Reading Lists."
Description
These poems span fifteen years of life in the northern industrial output of Prince George, BC. They portray family, friendship, sex, death, health, work, love and human hope as subjects of a harsh social, economic, and bureaucratic system that is itself trapped in its own contradictions and ironies. The Centre is McKinnon's first full-length book since Pulp Log, which won the BC Book Prize for poetry in 1991.
Contributor Notes
Barry McKinnon was born in Calgary, Alberta. He received his BA from Sir George Williams University, where he studied with Irving Layton, and his MA from the University of British Columbia. He currently is an English instructor at the College of New Caledonia in Prince George, BC. He has been widely published. The Centre was short-listed for the Governor General's Award for poetry and Pulp Log won the Dorothy Livesay Prize (BC Book Awards) for 1991.
Editorial Review
"Not much happens in the eleven pieces collected in The Centre. Their author, Barry McKinnon, sometimes drinks beer in seedy stripper bars or coffee at Tim Horton’s, shops at Sears, drives his truck somewhere, cuts wood, paints his house, marks essays. The real action takes place inside his head, for the pieces collected here are all sequences and serial poems recording the play of their author’s consciousness, a brooding, often emotionally evocative play that makes pleasingly heavy weather of the clouded mind as it registers social and natural as well as psychological phenomena. At his best, which happens frequently if also irregularly throughout The Centre, McKinnon makes his particulars pay their way; they are not there for the free ride of local colour."
—Canadian Literature
