The first title from Advance Editions, a new literary imprint from Vancouver’s Arsenal Pulp Press edited by Michael Turner (Hard Core Logo, American Whiskey Bar), is the debut of Vancouver poet Wayde Compton. 49th Parallel Psalm is a sinewy, angry, learned work that provides a West Coast perspective on the alienation of blacks in Canada.

The seven-part collection centres on the interior narrative of Mifflin Gibbs, a pioneering San Francisco newspaper publisher who attempted to flee racism in 1858 by immigrating to Victoria, B.C., then a British colony controlled by the Hudson’s Bay Company. The book is packed with mirror-like associations, knitting together reality and myth and past and present.

Gibbs’ narrative recounts his journey in mythic terms, and features an incarnation of the Haitian voodoo god Legba, a cane-toting gatekeeper between heaven and Earth. Legba reappears throughout the book, as the HBC’s chief trader James Douglas, who controls immigration to the colonies, and as a dance club DJ fading in the spirit world through the speakers.

Compton does his best work with a lithe, multi-layered phrasing, as in this example from “Rum Broadcast”: “I push up the levels / on this worn mixing board. treble / and strife. Bass / and superstructure. material / and spirit worlds, / dig it.” He is also compelling as the voice of Gibbs, publisher of the daily The Mirror of the Times newspaper and a “negro of letters,” wary of his task to articulate a “people of the dash.”

The book is less interesting where the Biblical and apocalyptic imagery are not so subtly employed. The sixth section is the book’s weakest, where the narrator’s voice flattens into earnest prose that reads too much like the product of a university writing seminar.

Overall, though, Compton draws on impressive mythic resources and a strong tradition of black sound poetry to tell a persuasive version of the black exodus from the U.S. to Canada. For Compton, Canada is as racist as its neighbour across the line. Only house music feels like home.