The candid, direct poems of Canoodlers interrogate sexuality, friendship, family, language, and social, cultural and political phenomena. Straddling genders, sexualities and social positions, the collection hilariously but harrowingly follows the growth and class leaps of a "townie tomboy."

From family relations ("Dearly beloved, Don Cherry has better conversation skills than my stepfather, and my mother doesn't love me anymore") to individual encounters and concerns ("Part of anyone can see how reasonable it is to stay at home and never leave, because you've anointed that wall, this toilet as safe, and you'd know it even if the lights never came back on"), Canoodlers is a personal study of contemporary consumerism, appropriating the language of marketing and pop culture, twisting and repositioning phrases that have become clichéd. These poems render the familiar unfamiliar and question how relationships function--families, friends, lovers--in contemporary suburban Canadian life.

andrea bennett is a non-binary National Magazine Award–winning writer, editor, and illustrator who lives in Ayjoo mixw (Powell River), BC. Their first book of essays, Like a Boy but Not a Boy: Navigating Life, Mental Health, and Parenthood Outside the Gender Binary (Arsenal Pulp Press), was a CBC Books’ pick for the top Canadian nonfiction of the year. Their first book of poetry, Canoodlers, was published by Nightwood in 2014. andrea’s poetry and non-fiction has been widely published in magazines and newspapers such as the Walrus, the Atlantic, Hazlitt, Maisonneuve, the Tyee, the Globe and Mail, Reader’s Digest, Vice, Geist, CV2, Grain, Fiddlehead, the Malahat Review, and Arc. With Kim Fu they co-host The Rough Puffs, a Great British Baking Show rewatch podcast now entering its third season.

andrea bennett's profile page