In childhood, the world seems vast, mysterious and unsettling as we attempt to meaningfully locate ourselves in its midst, and what belonging we find in adulthood is often but a veneer covering that irresoluble desire to understand “the desperate invocations of your little wanting heart.” In his poems, Tim Bowling writes with unapologetic honesty about our complex consciousness of the world and of the increasingly disconnected state of human experience, seeking always to snag on something elemental– “something in the forest / and the self–a hunger– / like a barbed hook in the jaw of the salmon.”

Finalist for the 2015 Robert Kroetsch City of Edmonton Book Prize.