Consciousness and nostalgia in the Swipe Right age

This collection attempts to find poetry, or what Gwendolyn MacEwen once called “a single symmetry,” amid the chaos of 21st-century life. A powerful catalogue of loss and human connection, it considers not only how our identities are formed by places and experiences rooted in childhood, but also by digital newsfeeds, YouTube, and the “gospel of Spotify.” These poems intimately confront topics as diverse as quantum physics, video arcades, mental illness, climate change, road rage, alcoholism, endangered species, and even a gigantic Noah’s Ark replica.

Chris Banks is a poet known for packing his lines with thought and feeling. Building on the generous work of John Koethe, Larry Levis, and Ada Limón, Banks’s wildly expansive, often lyric, deeply accessible poems are brilliant meditations on what it means to be human in a brave new world of cloud computing and smart phones.

Chris Banks is the author of five poetry collections, most recently Midlife Action Figure (ECW Press, 2019). His first full-length collection, Bonfires (Nightwood Editions, 2003) was awarded the Jack Chalmers Award for Poetry by the Canadian Authors’ Association in 2004. Bonfires was also a finalist for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award for best first book of poetry in Canada. His poetry has appeared in The New Quarterly, Arc Poetry Magazine, The Antigonish Review, Event, The Malahat Review, GRIFFEL, American Poetry Journal, PRISM International, among other publications. He lives in Waterloo, Ontario.

Chris Banks' profile page

• Short-listed, Eric Hoffer Book Award

“His meditations on the contemporary world are set against bittersweet poems in which he looks back on his younger years . . . There’s a fluid, conversational ease to Banks’s heartfelt meditations, as well a sense of urgency.” — Toronto Star