The North End Poems

Description

Channeling the beliefs, passions, fears, friends and fights of Nick Macfarlane, a young steeltown warehouse worker, Knox creates the kind of hardscrabble, blue collar world that exists everywhere. Benders and punchups, beaters and punchclocks, give The North End Poems the means to explore notions of masculinity in both familial and social environs.

Michael Knox is a writer and teacher. Raised in Hamilton and now living in Toronto, Knox's work has appeared in literary magazines in Canada and internationally. His critically acclaimed debut collection, Play Out the Match, was published by ECW Press in 2006.

"Powerful, heady, alert, no-surrender writing. Knox inhabits the stratosphere with this book. He makes it sound easy and flawless. He sings expansively about narrow lives, and lovingly about connections, and about failures to connect. He is the man to bring this slice of urban life alive, and I suspect he will be heard from for a long time into the future." --"Prairie Fire" "Each poem annunciates its nested group of main and supporting characters whose poetic sketches are so visceral as to grant the reader the feel of cigarette ash, grime, and blood under his or her fingers. . . . The reader can expect to be drawn in by the bald drama of the characters in each poetic sequence, and to be kept in a kind of headlock of rapt attention as the story unfurls." --"Scene Magazine"