Everything You Hold Dear: Poems

By Jamie Sharpe

“Brilliant lunatic assemblage.” — Today’s Book of Poetry on Cut-up Apologetic

From 2007 to 2016, Jamie Sharpe led an itinerant life, throughout British Columbia and the Yukon, in Sechelt, Prince George, Dawson, Salmon Arm, Whitehorse, Galiano, and Texada Island. When family life solidified around a sedentary existence, old scattershot suggested new targets …

By way of time’s amnesia, we’ve almost lost Sharpe entirely; only a few of his worm-eaten books remain in the musty libraries of literary perverts. The great record of Canadian literature is a list of prestigious “-ists” and “-isms” (the Realists gave way to Naturalists, replaced by Symbolists, affronted by Dadaism, bled into Surrealism, birthing the Post-Absurdist-Nouveau Roman … ). Some authors are so diverse we struggle to contain them with a name. Here’s hoping we can drag the ever-distinct Sharpe, against his will, without proper receptacle, into the future for a few years more. (The Associative Press)

Part roman à clef, lies, composite, and compendium, Everything You Hold Dear is an ode to poetry and a posthumous work from a living writer.

• Language: English
• Publisher: ECW Press
• Release date: Sep 15, 2020
• ISBN: 9781773056159

Book preview

Everything You Hold Dear

Poems

Jamie Sharpe

Contents

Dedication

Turning the Alphabet Into a Band-Aid

Moved

Find a Strong, Tall Mast

Each Snowfall’s Apocalypse

Bootstraps and Where Best to Purchase Them

Semaphored Hello To the Ivory Lighthouse

Don’t Have Many Ideas

Young Lusters

The New Long Poem

Ye Olde Horror Story Instrumental Break, 42 Bars

Avalanche Kills One

All Leech Diet

On the Novel

On Cauntpaux

Assessing Literary Value

Patti Smith/Patty Hearst

Gold Things Ring

Pall

Alaskan Socialite

Caption

Marketing

Septuagint House

Academic Probation at Sunday School

Martingale

With Day-Glo Nightsticks On the Thieving Teenaged Brain

While Coach Plays The Back Nine at Pebble Beach

Pardon My Glove LP

Foreword

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Copyright

Dedication

For Hannah & Ellis:

I’ve never been so afraid

or excited.

Turning the Alphabet Into a Band-Aid

When I was nobody, who I was

didn’t distract from what

I said. Now I’m a renowned

phlebotomist so you can’t see

past blood. We all have it, need it,

to be this rare, beautiful thing.

After A won the Trillium Award,

we hurled into a night of