What Your Hands Have Done

By Chris Bailey

What Your Hands Have Done looks at how life spent in a close-knit fishing family in rural Prince Edward Island marks a person. The book is rooted in PEI but moves from there to Toronto where the malaise of life proves to be unbound to the sameness of small-town days spent hauling gear on the Atlantic or toiling in rust-red potato fields.

Bailey examines the world around him from the inside, observing the minute to account for the vast. These poems are laid bare and free of ornament, revealing the hard-won wisdom just below the surface:

She was there, cooked for you. Helped clean

the mess you’d become from decades

spent on your father’s ocean hauling lobsters

from its depths, gulping down the sea air.

Even when the booze was too much,

she knew you were more than the vomit

caked to your shirt. Less than confessions

made beneath the red summer moon.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nightwood Editions
• Release date: Sep 8, 2018
• ISBN: 9780889711389

Chris Bailey

Chris Bailey ran a year-long productivity project where he conducted intensive research, as well as dozens of productivity experiments on himself, to discover how to become as productive as possible. He has written hundreds of articles on the subject and has garnered coverage in the media as diverse as the New York Times, Huffington Post, New York magazine, Harvard Business Review, TED, Fast Company and Lifehacker. The author of The Productivity Project, Chris lives in Ottawa, Ontario, in Canada.

Book preview

What_Your_Hands_Have_Done-COVER.jpg

what your hands have done

WHAT YOUR

HANDS

HAVE DONE

CHRIS BAILEY

2018

Copyright © Chris Bailey, 2018

all rights reserved

. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior permission of the publisher or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from Access Copyright, the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency, www.accesscopyright.ca, [e-mail].

Nightwood Editions

P.O. Box 1779

Gibsons, BC

v0n 1v0

Canada

www.nightwoodeditions.com

editor

: Amber McMillan

cover design & typesetting

: Carleton Wilson

Nightwood Editions acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country. We also gratefully acknowledge financial support from the Government of Canada and from the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.

This book has been produced on 100% post-consumer recycled,

ancient-forest-free paper, processed chlorine-free

and printed with vegetable-based dyes.

Printed and bound in Canada.

CIP

data available from Library and Archives Canada.

ISBN 978-0-88971-350-5

For my family:

Sometimes it’s about doing what you can and fuck the rest.

Contents

Your Father Will Tell You

Lobster Fishing with the Old Man / 11

My Uncle the Fisherman / 12

Fisherman Tales / 13

Brandon / 14

Mary Grace / 15

Bonnie / 16

William / 17

Crow Piss: a Pantoum / 18

This Guy / 19

Tommy / 20

The Fisherman’s Daughter / 21

The Actor’s Wife / 22

She Was There / 23

I Hope It’ll All Keep Together / 26

This Could Be It / 27

Mending Herring Nets / 28

Found Him Dead / 30

Peter / 31

Bored on the Boat / 32

You Want to Write About Love / 33

Spanish Dancing Horses / 34

Have a Cookie / 35

A Slow Process

A Slow Process / 39

The Morse Code of Blinking Tail Lights

Pillow Talk / 65

Bachelor Party Blues / 66

Early Morning / 67

A Bliss / 68

Kiss and Go: a Tanka / 69

When it Rains / 70

August 1988 / 72

How Could You Forget This? / 73

The Dream / 74

The Things You Tell Yourself / 75

Toronto City Streets / 76

Beetles Running Mad / 77

In the Mountains / 78

Autumn Evening / 79

The Place That’s Held You / 80

Uncle Stormcloud / 81

Soon the Frost’ll Settle / 82

Snow Is Falling / 83

She Wants to Make Sure You’re Sure / 84

Her Ringless Finger / 85

Your Father’s Rope / 86

Like Warren Zevon / 87

The Drop / 88