An old idea of reality animates the poems in The Mechanical Bird: things are never what they seem. Opening with a quick-talking disquisition on lying ("Keep it simple, tidy, / take a noncommittal stance") and ending with masterly mediation on the workshop and its "drawing-board dreams," Asa Boxer's debut constantly tests the claims of authenticity over artifice. Objects, settings and everyday details are swept up in an imagination that can never quite shake the sense of the visible world--even nature itself--as an artful mixture of fact and invention. As suggested by the eponymous metal songster, these poems are exquisitely crafted, infused with a sense of kinetic spell-making, and sing with an exuberant trust in their own guile.

Asa Boxer’s debut book, The Mechanical Bird (2007), won the Canadian Authors Association Prize for Poetry, and his cycle of poems entitled “The Workshop” won first prize in the 2004 CBC Literary Awards. His poems and essays have since been anthologised in various collections and have appeared in magazines internationally. Boxer is also a founder of the Montreal International Poetry Prize. He presently edits The Secular Heretic, an online magazine for the arts and sciences.

Asa Boxer's profile page

"...Boxer delights in the creative powers of language: he infuses life into every object, he explodes and implodes those objects, he creates alternate histories and secret lives for them, he imbues them with progeny." --ARC Poetry Magazine
"Here is an imagination able to fashion poetry out of grease and rust; out of a pocket or a table. Asa Boxer views the mechanical world that surrounds us, imbuing it with significance. Anyone reading these poems will never look at a hammer in the same way again. But The Mechanical Bird also engages the animate world, portraying it with wit and energy. A tree, for instance, is described as lsquo; 'growing blind with anticipation...tying knots into its skin.' (p.31) A sequence on 'The lie' offers this amusing advice: 'Butter your words on both sides/Not thickly but with finesse' (57). Innovative rhymes, unerring rhythms and a sure way with words mark Boxer's style. The Mechanical Bird is a welcome addition to Canadian poetry." --CAA judge
"Asa Boxer's, The Mechanical Bird, is the best book of a very current stream in Canadian writing: the western tradition of writing in form and often metre from the long history within which we write poetry. The form arrives easily, confidently and convincingly. Boxer's imagination is quixotic, surprising, compelling and his mind is sure. His poetry is like playing a harpsicord--when there were 32 notes compared with our now-thin octave of 8--striking all the right keys en-route to an effortless combination of subject and the best way to write about it. Music for the mind." --CAA Judge