Bren Simmers

Nightwood Editions, 2015

“A beautifully nuanced look at the challenge of allowing ourselves to claim and be claimed by a place. In this year-long cycle of poems, Simmers brings the sharp focus of a naturalist’s eye to the urban everyday of the Vancouver neighbourhood for which the book is named. Text becomes mapping, observations become ecology, dates become narrative. The poems are both fierce and faltering; they experiment with form without ever losing the voice and vulnerability that make them compelling.” – Anna Swanson

“Simmers’ book should be required reading for every member of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s cabinet, for she plots the angst of 30-somethings facing low wages, high debts, zilch pensions and zero hopes for affordable houses.” – George Elliott Clarke, The Herald

“Sunrise runs, crosses crosswalks and changes lanes, but it rarely sits. The book cultivates this velocity through rapid imagery describing the amassing and oscillating stimuli of a growing city . . . Simmers maps the city carefully, appealing to all of our senses with crisp vignettes and a diversity of form and language. . . . Often when I read poetry, I find myself reading a poem or two and then putting the book down to let the poems settle; however, with Sunrise, I read it almost straight through. I wanted to feel a year go by in an afternoon and be guided by Simmers through a part of Vancouver I didn’t know very well. Now, after reading the book, I feel like I’ve spent a whole life there, and it was a good one.” – Cole Mash, The Coastal Spectator

“Simmers searches for roots and wings among the feedback loop of the off-ramp, the slamming cupboards, eastbound crows and the open doors of her neighbourhood and it’s a search that sings – each poem a gem in the gutter, a love… cleft-grafted/ onto another to bear fruit, a craving, a canker, a song of hope for a hearth and a home.” –  Gillian Wigmore

Listen to a radio interview on CBC’s North by Northwest:

Listen to a radio interview about Hastings-Sunrise with Pearl Pirie, host of Literary Landscape.

Read the Quill & Quire interview with Ariel Gordon

Read the PRISM international interview with Rob Taylor

Purchase a copy of Hastings-Sunrise at your local independent bookstore or buy a copy online here