Bearmen Descend Upon Gimli is a contemporary myth told in lyric form. The poems in this collection follow Raymond Northwind, a past-middle-aged Odawa guy, who happens to be the icemaker and custodian for the Peter Glint Memorial Curling Club. Fate finds Northwind in his Gimli, Manitoba exile and because of it, he brings forth a semi-supernatural curling team of Cree “bearmen” to face off against the best teams from around Canada for a large and prestigious prize. Below the surface of these poems there are meditations on the role of ceremony, the place of sport in culture, the spirit of the land, and those that come to inhabit it. This work inhabits the intersection of cultures in Canada as facilitated by what is often seen as a quintessentially Canadian sport, curling, in a place that is the geographic midpoint of Canada.

D.A. Lockhart is the author of multiple collections of poetry and short fiction. His work has been shortlisted for the Raymond Souster Award, Indiana Author's Awards, First Nations Communities READ Award, and has been a finalist for the ReLit Award. His work has appeared widely throughout Turtle Island including, The Malahat Review, Grain, CV2, TriQuarterly, The Fiddlehead, ARC Poetry Magazine, Best Canadian Poetry, Best New Poetry from the Midwest, and Belt. Along the way his work has garnered numerous Pushcart Prize nominations, National Magazine Award nominations, and Best of the Net nominations. He is a graduate of the Indiana University - Bloomington MFA in Creative Writing program where he held a Neal-Marshall Graduate Fellowship in Creative Writing. He is pùkuwànkoamimëns of the Moravian of the Thames First Nation. Lockhart currently resides at Waawiiyaatanong and Pelee Island where he is the publisher at Urban Farmhouse Press.

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