Adventurize Your Summer!

Award-winning poet Chris Pannell’s latest collection, Adventurize Your Summer!, is a wide-ranging look at travel, art and life. The author writes poems about the “Eastern Migrating Tourist,” and the indifference of the waters of the Nile, with many stops in between. Pannell gives equal time to great paintings and to the retired cab driver on dialysis; he is as adept writing about the Beach Boys as describing the cafés of Lisbon. Hopscotching through time and space, the poems in Adventurize Your Summer! are a study in humanity, filled with keen observation, touched with both sorrow and the wry observation that life is never what is promised in the marketing copy.

AUTHOR

Chris Pannell

Chris Pannell serves on the board of Hamilton’s annual gritLIT Literary Festival. He has published three poetry books: Under Old Stars, Sorry I Spent Your Poem and Drive. He is also the author of a set of three poetry broadsheets entitled, Fractures, Subluxations and Disclocations, which won the Hamilton & Region Arts Council poetry book award in 1997. From 1993 until 2005 he ran the New Writing Workshop at Hamilton Artists Inc. and edited two book-lengh anthologies for the group. He has been published in literary magazines across Canada and internationally as well.

Reviews

“I read Pannell’s new book and found his words deepy moving.”
– Hamilton Spectator

“The poems are a finely balanced dialogue between empathy and detachment. Death is shockingly extraordinary, yet banal, common. Although everyone is born with a life sentence, the endings are as variable as punctuation marks.”
– Northumberland Today

“It may be gritty, and at times dark, but it’s Pannell’s ability to infuse moments of light that makes the collection shine.”
– Hamilton Magazine