David McGimpsey’s poetry tends to offend the snotty aesthetes of the Canadian literati, in part because it dares to traffic in the detritus of low culture: Snooki, Justin Bieber, AC/DC, and Rebecca Black are all name-checked in his most recent book, a semi-autobiographical picaresque composed of 128 “chubby sonnets” – 16 lines rather than the classical 14. The same charge has been levied against Joyce’s Ulysses and the films of Tarantino, but like those works, 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: “At last year’s prestigious Ho-Lit awards / I won the coveted Layton Medallion / (rhymes with ‘Canadian Stallion’).” That he can seamlessly transition from this kind of thing to the emotional gut punch of “What Was That Poem?,” about a mother’s death, only proves McGimpsey’s masterful versatility and confidence.
