Asbestos Heights

Asbestos Heights is the poke in poetry’s eye that misses and ends up somewhere else.

Implored by concerned readers to be ‘classy’ and ‘real’ for once, David McGimpsey has composed a sequence of canonical note­books on all things ‘poetic’ and ‘poetical.’ Birds! Flowers! History! Sad leaders! The word ‘aubade’! They’re all here, in a serial, State Fair–bound collection of lyrics set in the working­-class belvedere of Asbestos Heights.

Among the refreshing lemon­-lime sodas of the world and the rousing lyrics to ‘Bootylicious,’ Asbestos Heights amps up McGimpsey’s trademark sideswiping of formal rhetoric and prosody with pop savoir faire to find his boldest collection. Imagine Petrarch in a Tweet war about where to buy a good pair of dad jeans. Imagine Yeats but with a lot fewer swans. Imagine a poet who was told long ago that nothing good ever comes out of a place like Asbestos Heights.

‘David McGimpsey is unfuckwithable, poetry­wise, and I’ll stand on John Ashbery’s coffee table in my cowboy boots and say that.’

— Michael Robbins

'The GG-nominated Montreal poet takes the skewering of poetry clichés to new heights in this bold collection. … Absurd and hilarious.'

— CBC Books