Home of Sudden Service

By Elizabeth Bachinsky

Book Overview

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2006 GOVERNOR GENERAL'S AWARD

Elizabeth Bachinsky is one of those rare poets capable of negotiating poetic forms with rigour and testing their limits, while never losing sight of the strange, dark music of what it means to be human. We should expect great things from her. --The Globe and Mail

Home of Sudden Service is a sad and scary book of punk rock villanelles and sonnets about delinquency.

Set in Anyvalley, North America, Home of Sudden Service centres around the experiences of young people growing up in the suburbs. The contrast of elegant poetic forms with the colloquial, often harsh language of suburban teens makes for a compelling and engaging achievement.

Bachinsky creates a gothic landscape that will be familiar to anyone who's visited the suburbs. Here, young Brownies dance, learn to sew and get badges in a series of eerie rituals, and smalltown girls settle down early. Murder, lust, teen pregnancy and a young man's disappearance are all discussed with a matter-of-fact, dispassionate voice.

But this world is not without humour and hope. Home of Sudden Service concludes with Drive, a series of fifteen sonnets about the poet's trip across Canada with her sister -- and out of the setting of their youth.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0889712123
• ISBN13: 9780889712126
• Release Date: March 2006
• Publisher: Nightwood Editions
• Length: 78 Pages
• Weight: 0.26 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 5.2" x 7.3"

Customer Reviews

An engaging collection of Elizabeth Bachinsky's insightfully intimate poetry

Home Of Sudden Service is an engaging collection of Elizabeth Bachinsky's insightfully intimate poetry. Showcasing some of her best work, Home Of Sudden Service assaults barriers with a kind of subversive poetry that will be especially appreciated by the discerning reader. Night Voices: I want the chilled blue/nights I gave to girls I'll never see again./I want their long cool limbs,/the faint movement their bodies made beside me,/rain on the flysheet of our tent, a lake below/us, dark and quiet, but for night/birds--bats--hurtling through the bent/branches above. I want my girls back-/lit by the moon then warmed/by the campfire we built together./I want their secrets. To hear/their high laughter from a distance/among the trees, so far from the houses where/we lived, we felt free.