Bateman continues the writer’s experiments with Rococo prose-poetry on themes of ageing, puzzlement, lovers past, faulty parents, and objects of desire. Bateman flirts with ideas of isolation, beauty, trauma, the sanctity of gossip and the secrets that he feels compelled to divulge and disclose. Like the epigraph for his poem Boston 1989, “only parts of this are true but all of them are real."

Compulsive Acts editor David Bateman is a performance poet, literature and creative writing instructor, journalist, and visual artist living and working in Toronto.

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designation youth performs precision in its exacting signatures of voice and rhythm. These poems are “speaking poems” that use the “spoken poem” as a prop. David Batemen recuperates the honesty of a personal lyric by a subtle and intelligent attention to the particular way of telling something. And the pleasure in these little fictions is that he so skillfully uses the poem to play them out. – Fred Wah

Bateman’s latest continues his questing trialogue via many forms, lengths, and shapes in verse but always with the surefooted emotion, devastating honesty, and poetic pyrotechnics we’ve come to expect. Among his many accomplishments in designation youth is his regeneration of the long poem so loved by the Victorians. They’d be astonished to read what he has done with the form. – Felice Picano