War and Other Inconveniences

This collection combines several poems written since 2020 with five poems of older origin. An earlier version of “A Pretty Good Planet” appeared in Alberta Views in March 2022. An earlier version of “Guernica, Then and Now,” appeared in Canadian Dimension in November 8, 2023.

Together, the poems deal with the growing dystopian elements of our age. War, threats of war, our collective apathy, and its consequences take centre stage. But war also shares the stage with other threats—climate change, pestilence, oligarchic power, and right-wing authoritarianism. The poems bend towards the dark but in the author's words, he would rather walk in the truthful dark than in a false light.