This Bygone Route by Jeff Parent
First electronic edition
ISBN 978-1-989668-20-7
Praise for This Bygone Route:
Jeff Parent’s poems remind us how eerily (sometimes comically) wondrous the world is and humans are. They evoke those tip-of-the-tongue, corner-of-the-mind places with just enough precision to make them present, but not so much that they get pinned down into stability. Here’s a universe in which an interstellar object, the loneliest whale in the world, and Dollarama cohabit. And – wait – it’s ours.
- Stephanie Bolster, author of White Stone: The Alice Poems and A Page from the Wonders of Life on Earth
Jeff Parent's chapbook is somber, sarcastic, and damn funny, with a voice as "sure as furniture in the dark." These sometimes-unsettling poems buzz with strange and foreboding beauty that becomes more surreal the further in you venture, eerie domesticity sitting against acid rain, lonely whales, Mars rising, and portals opening, all stitched together by the sense that though "the only true weather / is the steady fall of the dead / in motes, / my frequencies are jubilant.”
- Conyer Clayton, author of We Shed Our Skin Like Dynamite
This is a collection that takes note of the tiny moments of living, and then catalogues them with meticulous care. From the sunlight that falls into a footprint full of water, to small beach stones that applaud the arriving tide, This Bygone Route asks the reader to pay attention to the little things that so often might seem insignificant at first glance, but soon reveal themselves to be emblematic of the larger shifts that so often occur throughout a person’s life.
- Kim Fahner, author of You Must Imagine the Cold Here, braille on water, The Narcoleptic Madonna, Some Other Sky, and These Wings
Featuring cover art by Síle Englert