Asbestos Heights

*If you tore off the tops of canola —

yellow canola flowers — would you

jump in a tub of canola margarine

just to make the best of despair?*

Implored by concerned readers to be ‘classy’ and ‘real’ for once, David McGimpsey has composed a sequence of canonical note­books on all things ‘poetic’ and ‘poetical.’ Birds! Flowers! History! Sad leaders! The word ‘aubade’! They’re all here, in a serial, State Fair–bound collection of lyrics set in the working­class belvedere of *Asbestos Heights.*

Among the refreshing lemon­lime sodas of the world and the rousing lyrics to ‘Bootylicious,’ *Asbestos Heights* amps up McGimpsey’s trademark sideswiping of formal rhetoric and prosody with pop savoir faire to find his boldest collection. Imagine Petrarch in a Tweet war about where to buy a good pair of dad jeans. Imagine Yeats but with a lot fewer swans. Imagine a poet who was told long ago that nothing good ever comes out of a place like Asbestos Heights.

'David McGimpsey is unfuckwithable, poetry-wise, and I'll stand on John Ashbery's coffee table in my cowboy boots and say that.' — Michael Robbins

**David McGimpsey** is the author of several books of poetry and short fiction. His poetry has been shortlisted for the Governor General's Literary Award and the A.M. Klein Prize. He is also a musician, a fiction editor for *Joyland*, and his travel writing is a regular feature of *enRoute* magazine. He lives in Montréal, where he teaches creative writing and literature at Concordia University.