Asking for Directions is open and accessible debut collection. This book is a happy hour of poetry that blurs the lines between straight-up realism, goofy weirdness, linear narrative, dreamscape, lovestruck awe, wonder and joy. Poetry for Firth is under every rock. Poetry is the handyman who should be tiling a kitchen backsplash but instead relives lost dreams of hockey glory. Poetry is a creepy and distracted high school geography teacher. Poetry is snowmobilers on a patio drinking beer next to a thawing, late-March lake. Poetry is impending heart surgery, birds, the dead, skinny strippers, euchre parties, funerals, graffiti, Sunday morning hotel rooms, ashtrays, blue flowers, desiccated chipmunk carcasses, and, of course, sex, love, and laundry. There's all this and more in this bold, beautiful, and ballsy collection of new poems from a writer who has shifted over from short fiction without missing a beat. Come on it; read it and feel what it's like to have faith in "warm touch/at the altar/of your hips."

Matthew Firth has run his own independent micro press, Black Bile Press, since 1993. He edits/publishes the literary magazine Front&Centre, and he's had a regular books column in the Ottawa Xpress since April 2002. Previous publications include the short story collections Can You Take Me There, Now?; Fresh Meat; and most recently Suburban Pornography & Other Stories (Anvil Press, 2006).

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