Ken Belford is an eco-poet who examines the archtypically Canadian conflict between developement and preservation. The sharp social commentary of his work establishes British Columbia's northern Interior as the battlefront. Though he generally favours preservation, Belford varies his perspective from poem to poem to capture the full spectrum of the conflict.

In many of the poems, Belford struggles with how his way of life implicates him in something about which we should all feel guilty. The food he eats, the house he dwells in and the oil that keeps him warm are all products of industries that destroying destroying natural habitat. Without being theoretical, the unified consciousness of this collection portrays all the raw emotions and frustrations within the contemporary environmental debate. Belford's personal divisiveness is representative of a much larger social division that incorporates us all.

Ken Belford was born to a farming family in Alberta and grew up in Vancouver. For more than thirty years, he, along with his wife and daughter, operated a non-consumptive enterprise in the unroaded mountains at the vicinity of the headwaters of the Nass and Skeena Rivers.The “self-educated Lan(d)guage” poet has said that living for decades in the “back country” has afforded him a unique relationship to language that rejects the colonial impulse to write about nature, but speaks from the regions of the other.“The conventional standards of narrative and lyric poetry give me nothing. The intention of the sequences I write is to assemble words that can be messaged to the habituated souls of the city from the land-aware that live outside city limits.”Currently living in Prince George, British Columbia, with his activist wife, Si, Belford continues to write outside the boundaries of the conventional forms of the various schools of poetry.His seven previous books of poetry are Fireweed, The Post Electric Caveman, Pathways Into the Mountains, lan(d)guage, when snakes awaken, Ecologue, Decompositions, Internodes, and Slick Reckoning.

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