News and Interviews

Read an Excerpt of Jamie Sharpe's Wonderfully Weird Everything You Hold Dear

Date
October 01, 2020

cover_everything you hold dear

Jamie Sharpe's previous poetry collections, Animal Husbandry Today, Cut-up Apologetic, and Dazzle Ships, showed the work of not only a witty and perceptive mind but a wildly creative one. 

His newest offering, Everything You Hold Dear (ECW Press) shows Sharpe at the height of his ability to surprise readers with delightful weirdness, out of the box storytelling, and subtle humour. A poetic mash up of memoir, imagination, and damn lies, Everything You Hold Dear is an utterly fresh and immensely readable collection. 

We're proud to present an excerpt from Everything You Hold Dear, courtesy of ECW Press. Get a taste for Sharpe's fun, smart, and utterly singular style in these poems. 

Excerpt from Everything You Hold Dear by Jamie Sharpe:

 

Ye Olde Horror Story

             Instrumental Break, 42 Bars

 

No character development beyond flimsy

careers, dire apartments, dumb catchphrases.

Kyle claimed he’d karaoke Hot Chocolate’s

 

“Every 1’s a Winner,” then murdered

Vangelis’ “Chariots of Fire.” We sat, pre-pub-

escent horndogs, waiting. Slain by anything

 

willing to alight on us. Drunk, indolent,

in love. Worship without devotion.

 

             Is this our last song?

             It is.

 

             Thank you weird,

             flaming knapsack.

 

Jamie Sharpe image 1

 

Avalanche Kills One

 

Bought Stiegl Grapefruit Radler

and a condo overlooking

the detox centre

 

to view Alps

puke sour suns.

 

Thick, yellow voltas.

 

Jamie Sharpe image 2

______________________________________________

This excerpt is taken from Everything You Hold Dear by Jamie Sharpe, copyright © 2020 by Jamie Sharpe. Published by ECW Press.

Jamie Sharpe is the author of three other collections of poetry: Animal Husbandry Today, Cut-up Apologetic, and Dazzle Ships. He lives in Comox, B.C.

Buy the Book

Everything You Hold Dear

Jamie Sharpe, ECW Press

“Brilliant lunatic assemblage.” — Today’s Book of Poetry on Cut-up Apologetic

From 2007 to 2016, Jamie Sharpe led an itinerant life, throughout British Columbia and the Yukon, in Sechelt, Prince George, Dawson, Salmon Arm, Whitehorse, Galiano, and Texada Island. When family life solidified around a sedentary existence, old scattershot suggested new targets …

By way of time’s amnesia, we’ve almost lost Sharpe entirely; only a few of his worm-eaten books remain in the musty libraries of literary perverts. The great record of Canadian literature is a list of prestigious “-ists” and “-isms” (the Realists gave way to Naturalists, replaced by Symbolists, affronted by Dadaism, bled into Surrealism, birthing the Post-Absurdist-Nouveau Roman … ). Some authors are so diverse we struggle to contain them with a name. Here’s hoping we can drag the ever-distinct Sharpe, against his will, without proper receptacle, into the future for a few years more. (The Associative Press)

Part roman à clef, lies, composite, and compendium, Everything You Hold Dear is an ode to poetry and a posthumous work from a living writer.

Everything You Hold Dear

Upcoming events

January 29

Shab-e She'r (Poetry Night) CVII

January 29, 2025 @ 7:00pm - 10:00pm