Maybe Alice Burdick was beginning to get very tired. I don’t know. But the next to last poem in Book of Short Sentences is unlike anything else she’s ever published. The poem, “Don’t Forget,” is direct, uninhibited, and visceral. Burdick’s voice is emboldened by a sense of emergency (social, political, and ecological) that she feels in her body’s hotheaded cells.
There is no private life which has not been determined by a wider public life. — George Eliot[1]
Stephen Brockwell is an Ottawa poet who runs a small IT company from a tiny office in the Chateau Laurier. His collection Fruitfly Geographic won the Archibald Lampman Award in 2004.
Note: It has been many years since he stood on Yonge Street in Toronto wearing a “Writer Going to Hell: Buy My Books” sign (he sold 7,000 of his books this way in the ’80s), but Stuart Ross (b. 1959) continues to be an active and influential presence in the Canadian small press.
A short interview with Stephen Brockwell
Stephen Brockwell is an Ottawa poet who runs a small IT company from a tiny office in the Chateau Laurier. His collection Fruitfly Geographic won the Archibald Lampman Award in 2004.