Trouble Sleeping by Phil Hall - [SPEARING PINEAPPLE RINGS from a can with a stick] (Brick Books) - Brick Books Poetry Map (sitios de interés)

Phil Hall has taught writing and literature The Kootenay School of Writing and numerous other Canadian colleges. He has been a poet in residence at the University of Western Ontario, the Kingston Writer’s Workshop, The Sage Hill Writing Experience in Saskatchewan, and elsewhere.

Since 1976 he has been a small publisher of broadsides and chapbooks under his Flat Singles Press imprint. In 2001, his book Trouble Sleeping was nominated for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry. Hall holds an M.A. in creative writing from The University of Windsor. He has been the literary editor of This Magazine and is editor and publisher of Flat Singles Press. He teaches poetry at George Brown College and English at Seneca College, both in Toronto.

Phil Hall 's Trouble Sleeping, he describes as a haiban, “a Japanese form of interwoven journey-prose and poetry,” which he uses to explore his troubled childhood in Rokeby, Ontario.

This experience is at the core of Hall's Trouble Sleeping. It is the source of bad dreams and also, paradoxically, the source of his crisp, luminous text. Trouble Sleeping makes visible the poetry of hopeful despair by remembering a poor working class family of Irish descent, living outside the margins of respectability at the edge of the Laurentian Shield in mid-Northern Ontario in the 1950s.

This raw world is seen by a child who is a misfit in it (especially among its brutal, drunken males). That child will eventually come to speak for the plight of unregarded misfits in society at large.

"Orthodontics is a class issue" to the writer looking back on a time when it never occurred to his parents that crooked teeth might be fixed - not that they could have afforded it. In Trouble Sleeping, working a variation on the Japanese form of haibun, Hall alternates prose passages with poems that reflect nightmarishly on the interwoven narratives.

Cover art: Tripod sculptures by Richard Henriquez, Vancouver architect and artist

Phil Hall reads [SPEARING PINEAPPLE RINGS from a can with a stick] from Trouble Sleeping on Audioboo

The Kootenay School of Writing

Phil Hall (poet)

Phil Hall on inspiration, language and the restraints of nationalism

Phil Hall’s wins the Trillium Book Award

Buy Trouble Sleeping by Phil Hall at Brick Books