A Cemetery for Holes

By Tom Prime and Gary Barwin

In A Cemetery for Holes, poetic language bends and breaks, resists and reforms under the stress of family trauma. Consensual reality shifts with nonconsensual harm. It is this history of violence which is ultimately, confronted, fought against, and overcome. While engaged in this struggle, the poems also strive to rebuild, to console and to rediscover the world, its beauty, tenderness, humour, and joy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gordon Hill Press
• Release date: Sep 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9781928171867

Tom Prime

Tom Prime has an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Victoria (Specializing in Poetry). He as a BA at Western University. He has been published in Carousel, Ditch, Fjords Review, The Northern Testicle, The Rusty Toque, and Vallum. His first chapbook, A Strange Hospital, was published on Proper Tales Press. His latest chapbook, Gravitynipplemilkplanet Anthroposcenesters, was published on above/ground press. His collaborative collection of poems written with Gary Barwin, A Cemetery for Holes, is available from Gordon Hill Press.

Book preview

YVR

I move to the Vancouver airport.

the plane is always one hour and forty-nine minutes late.

that hour and forty-nine minutes

becomes a room I build

out of billions of toothpicks.

the world changes with the shifting

of the magnetic poles. cigarettes smoked

by the rain, the fumes of forest fires.

inside my toothpick house, I’m a kind of joke

like fighting the war on drugs.

every thousand years,

a little bird flies over my toothpick house,

carries a phone charger in its beak.

am I a bag of toffee? am I bark on a dead IV-tree?

the clouds evolve when they have occupations.

LGA

I arrive at LaGuardia

one hour and forty-nine minutes after my death

my death is a room

filled with leaves

now it’s one hour and fifty minutes after my