Li'l Bastard

(Paperback)

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Description

Finalist for the 2012 Governor General's Award for Poetry

Melding the deeply personal and the culturally popular, Li'l Bastard is confessional poetry as written by a chronic trickster and a committed liar. Written in part as an homage to John Berryman and Robert Lowell, this sequence of sixteen-line poems"chubby sonnets"explores the poet's obsessions (food, aging, baseball, beer, and Barnaby Jones) and map his midlife crisis on a wild flight through Montreal, Chicago, Nashville, Texas, and Los Angeles. Poignant and often achingly funny, Li'l Bastard will cement David McGimpsey's status as a beloved original.

David McGimpsey is the author of four acclaimed collections of poetry, including Lardcake and Sitcom. He teaches at Concordia University in Montreal.

Reviews

"McGimpsey displays erudition, clever insights and a knack for the wickedly funny wisecrack." -- The Washington Post 'McGimpsey writes descriptively, singing the world as it actually is ... A truly inclusive and scrupulous feast, caloric, chaotic and free.' -- National Post 'McGimpsey's unruly, uncontained poems marry formal ingenuity and a raucous, hilarious sensibility. He's also unafraid to poke at the eyes of our more inflated literary pretensions.' -- Quill and Quire 'Hilarious and brilliant ... These chubby sonnets spill ingenuity over their waistbands.' -- Winnipeg Free Press 'If you're into poetry, you should be reading David McGimpsey. Not because his books are hilarious -- which they are -- but because his writing brims with a charming honesty that is both infectious and refreshing.' Geist Magazine 'Li'l Bastard, is what The Dream Songs might have been if John Berryman had been drunk on McDo milkshakes instead of alcohol ... McGimpsey is the master of effortless irreverence. Where other poets exert themselves looking for ways to innovate, he skewers lyrical earnestness on the one hand and high-brow reinvention of the wheel on the other, while still responding to poetic tradition and forging his own path away from the mainstream.' -- Montreal Review of Books 'The writing is creative, funny, and reveals the sometimes innocent, sometimes tragic, pleasures of reading and writing. McGimpsey is obviously having a lot of fun, and so are we.' -- The Rover 'Achilles and Odysseus may have seen more action, but they're less funny than David McGimpsey.' -- Edmonton Journal

Author Bio

David McGimpsey: David McGimpsey was born and raised in Montreal. He is the author of four acclaimed collections of poetry, including Lardcake and Sitcom (now in its second printing), which was a finalist for both the A.M. Klein Prize and the ReLit Award. In 2009, the CBC listed David as one of Canada's ten best English-language poets. He has a PhD in Literature (specializing in American fiction) and is the author of the award-winning study Imagining Baseball: America's Pastime and Popular Culture. McGimpsey writes a regular humour column called 'The Self-Esteem Workout' for Montreal's Matrix Magazine and the 'Sandwich of the Month' column as a contributing editor for EnRoute (AirCanada's in-flight magazine). David lives in the Mile-End district of Montreal and teaches creative writing and literature at Concordia University.