A Walker in the City

Méira Cook

• Publisher: Brick Books
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781771310994
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Canadian Poetry
• Index: Literature

Shortlisted for the 2012 Aqua Lansdowne Prize for PoetryA fascinating, ambling, loitering mystery story in verse, a whoizzit rather than a whodunit.In this innovative and arresting narrative poem, Méira Cook's walker, a young woman, is a character being written by an "old city poet, " who is in turn being written by another poet, for whom the young woman, "Ms. Em Cook, " has been an amanuensis. Always witty and often hilarious, feather-light in touch, the book is an entertaining exploration of serious issues: youth and age; life, death and rebirth; the (dis)connection of language and reality; tradition and the now. It is an assemblage of seven nesting sections, each of them a sort of chapbook speaking to each of the others and rounding out a long poem of great freshness. A Walker in the City is one of a kind, one of the most original books Brick has ever published.Her lover stirs and reaches for herand listen -- it's as if she cracks into a hundred pieces with rage and every jagged shard flings itself at his neck.Instead she turns over on her back and practices her thought balloons: if I don't get there in time start without me and none for me thanks but please help yourself.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• A Walker in the City
• The Beautiful Assassin: A Poem Noir
• Being Dead
• Posthumous
• Appendix A: The Keyhole Poems
• Appendix B: Follow Me
• Last Poems
• Acknowledgements
• Biographical Note