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This Isn't the Apocalypse We Hoped For

Al Rempel

How do we navigate a world of fast-food joints, big-box stores and traffic jams, where people grandstand in the deli and homeless men announce the end of the world through “slats in the sky”? Where the cumulative result of our lifestyle is a gyre of garbage and plastic in the North Pacific? Al Rempel’s This Isn’t the Apocalypse We Hoped For addresses this concern with humility and compassion, as it takes us above the trees in a sky canoe and into the city, asking us to receive each kindness and press it close while we journey across this earth we’ve inherited “with the tilt and skew of athletes.”

 

“Rempel is a master at setting up straw men and then knocking them down. These are oral performance tricks, played almost pitch perfect. Reading this book is like watching both the poems and Rempel onstage, playing the crowd.”

—ARC Poetry Magazine

“An important and rewarding book.”

—Canadian Literature

Fred Cogswell Award for Excellence in Poetry — Shortlisted, 2014