Vancouver for Beginners
Alex Leslie
In Vancouver for Beginners, the nostalgia of place is dissected through the mapping of a city where readers are led past surrealist development proposals, post-apocalyptic postcards, childhood landmarks long gone and a developer who paces at the city's edge, shoring it up with aquariums.
In these poems you will traverse a city lined with rivers, not streets. Memory traps and tourist traps reveal themselves, and the ocean glints, elusive, in the background. Here there are many Vancouvers and no Vancouver, a city meant for elsewhere after the flood has swept through. This place of the living and the dead has been rewritten: forests are subsumed by parks, buildings sink and morph, and the climate has changed.
Vancouver for Beginners is a ghost story, an elegy and a love song for a city that is both indecipherable and a microcosm of a world on fire. (From Book*Hug Press)
Vancouver for Beginners is available in Oct. 2019.
Alex Leslie won the 2015 Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ emerging writers. She was a finalist for the CBC Short Story Prize in 2007.