Dreamland Theatre

The Dreamland Theatre exists in a photograph of a white building on sledges being pulled through the mud from one location to another by a team of horses in Prince George (then Fort George) circa 1912. These poems are about imagining place and, continuing the work of Finding Ft. George, Rob Budde’s process of trying, and failing, to find out where he is. Poetry is part of a place, and this book deals in the powerful homemaking that is language itself.

AUTHOR

Rob Budde

Rob Budde teaches Creative Writing and Critical Theory at the University of Northern BC and has taught previously at the University of Winnipeg and the University of Manitoba. He is the author of four previous books —Catch as Catch, traffick, Misshapen, and The Dying Poem — as well as the editor of the interview collection In Muddy Water: Conversations with 11 Poets. He has been a finalist for the John Hirsch Award for Most Promising Manitoba Writer and the McNally Robinson Manitoba Book of the Year. He lives with his family in Prince George, BC.

Reviews

“This is the kind of poetry that doesn’t conform to urban forms, but instead talks about a different economy. Come and listen in as poet Robert Budde thoughtfully asks ‘on what land am I standing.’ Budde asks us to think of something new, and in poems after poem we realize his ‘hut shaped ideas’ are ‘just around the bend’ of what is, as he says, ‘an inconclusive map’ populated, everything being equal, not only with unregulated spaces, but friends’ faces, as things go.”

–Ken Belford, author of lan(d)guage