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Poetry Canadian

Midlife Action Figure

Poems

by (author) Chris Banks

Publisher
ECW Press
Initial publish date
Sep 2019
Category
Canadian
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9781770415058
    Publish Date
    Sep 2019
    List Price
    $18.95
  • eBook

    ISBN
    9781773054094
    Publish Date
    Sep 2019
    List Price
    $12.99

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Description

 

Banks’s stunning new collection, exploring bold frontiers

Midlife Action Figure delivers surprise, delight, and sense.” – Quill & Quire, starred review

“Poetry is an act of mischief,” Theodore Roethke famously once said, and Chris Banks takes this as his credo in Midlife Action Figure. His subject matter ranges from the familiar to the surreal, taking readers through poems that are both wondrous and strange, heartfelt and humorous, controlled and impatient. Whether calling a tree “an anthology of leaves” or describing time as “a Fisher-Price View-Master of ‘first kisses’ and ‘no return’ policies,” Banks approaches writing as if anything might make for alarming, strange, and dizzying verse.

Banks knits together wit with wildly inventive imagery as he follows his poems outside convention where they play with stolen matches. Capable of both deep introspection and the quick turn of phrase, he places his tongue firmly in his cheek as he looks for a measure of human wonder in this intermission between TED Talks and the apocalypse. Midlife Action Figure is a tour de force for anyone looking for that rare book that is as exciting as it is provocative, showcasing both pathos and humor, while it explores what it means to be alive in the early 21st century.

 

About the author

Chris Banks is the author of five poetry collections, most recently Midlife Action Figure (ECW Press, 2019). His first full-length collection, Bonfires (Nightwood Editions, 2003) was awarded the Jack Chalmers Award for Poetry by the Canadian Authors’ Association in 2004. Bonfires was also a finalist for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award for best first book of poetry in Canada. His poetry has appeared in The New Quarterly, Arc Poetry Magazine, The Antigonish Review, Event, The Malahat Review, GRIFFEL, American Poetry Journal, PRISM International, among other publications. He lives in Waterloo, Ontario.

Chris Banks' profile page

Excerpt: Midlife Action Figure: Poems (by (author) Chris Banks)

 

Time’s Atlas

 

Some people treat each day like IKEA instructions.

 

Others look for a higher dimension in church pews.

 

Hot yoga studios. Time is an atlas. A Fischer-Price

 

View-Master of first kisses and “no return” policies.

 

I wish this was even more poetic. Throw in the phrase

 

In Media Res like a trial balloon. A benediction. A spark-plug.

 

Another celebrity has overdosed on alcohol and benzos.

 

Every story deserves a splashy two-page spread. Despite

 

Old Navy ads and tooth-paste for sensitive teeth, the heart is

 

a scourge. My spirit-animal is a scarecrow. The first-person

 

singular feels wrong here, but the hive-mind, all that buzzing,

 

overwhelms me. How many different ways to say Hallelujah?

 

I think we would all feel better if we were allowed to fall apart

 

one day out of the year. If only we could burn the briefcases.

 

I miss the sound of cicadas. Electric dusk. What do they care

 

about the end of post-modernism? Birth of narrow-casting?

 

Everyone has a few words they would like to bury forever.

 

I am losing landmarks as I get older, but thankfully we can

 

google it all. The little white house on a hill overlooking

 

the highway needs a new coat of paint but it is still there.

 

The uranium mine, the miners, are gone. If you feel yourself 

 

going crazy, you probably are. Only a little. Young men

 

in black and white photographs, wearing soldier uniforms

 

or baseball attire, stare out stoically from the back wall

 

of dimly-lit bars and taverns. Today, wellness programs

 

preach resiliency like they are selling hamburgers. I keep

 

turning the pages of Time’s atlas. I trace its illustrations

 

with my fingers. The contoured lines. The last pages

 

blank, then something, new shapes, a lost continent,

 

new ports of call. A secret harbour, or a penal colony.

 

I mark a big X where the future will make landfall.

 

Editorial Reviews

 

Midlife Action Figure delivers surprise, delight, and sense; Banks slams sly one liners as though he were competing in a professional wrestling match . . . The result is breathlessly entertaining and gut-punchingly wise . . . Midlife Action Figure is an insightful tour through the human experience, crafted in clear and specific imagery that captivates the imagination and the intelligence. It is a book that begs to be read and reread.” — Quill & Quire Starred Review

“[A] spirited, wide-ranging collection.” — Toronto Star

 “A dense, electric collection filled with whip-smart lines and crackling imagery.” — Winnipeg Free Press

“‘The laboratory of aesthetics / these days is really about mischief / and surprise’ writes Chris Banks in this collection of cheeky, pointed dicta on everything from how to survive an emergency to enduring a job interview, amid surreal admissions that the speaker has a ‘minor crush on Saturn's moons’ or possibly suffers a ‘slow leak’ as each year his ‘heart grows an extra ring.’ Midlife Action Figure is a book of solid poems from the centre of existing, through deep space and the places in the mind like ‘Matryoshka dolls’ that endlessly nest into their own allusiveness, returning with a yield of essential observations and imperatives for the continuance of the earth.” — Catherine Owen, award-winning author of Designated Mourner

“‘My spirit guide is a scarecrow’; ‘guilt is everyone’s personal gulag’; ‘can I coat-check this malaise?’; ‘death is classically trained’: Chris Banks builds poems out of short sentences that are like photons, little packets of energy full of aphoristic punch and surprise. He delights in the swings of imagination, in the way every next image or idea can plow new ground even as it alters the meaning and feel of what has preceded it. The result is a constant state of euphoria, an ongoing demonstration of the swerve and swirl of human consciousness. ‘A river is a correspondence course’ — as with so many lines here, my recognition that I’ve never thought of it that way is followed immediately by the sensation that there’s no other way to see it, that I am being shown the truth.” — Bob Hicok, award-winning poet and author of Elegy Owed

 

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