On June 17, 1958, Vancouver’s Second Narrows Bridge collapses while under construction. Eighteen men plunged to their deaths, and many others were injured. Falsework provides an elegiac portrait of the many lives affected by the crumpling of that seemingly indomitable structure. In this extraordinary book, Gary Geddes takes the distant tragedy of the bridge collapse and captures the grit and spirit of the workers who died that day as much as the hollow pain of survivors and their families. The voices that speak from these pages are fictive, but by weaving his polyphonic narrative with grainy archival photos Geddes evokes the intimacy of his characters’s lives and the awful truth of experiences both raw and profane.
“Meaningful.”
– Georgia Straight

“Geddes has imagined the voices of those most directly affected by the accident for an unusual collection of poetry, prose, and archival photos.”
– BC Bookworld

“This is fabulous, a wildly successful book. Gary Geddes goes to where the danger is. Falsework is a new kind of poetry of the city; at once multi-voiced, inquisitive, erotic, tragic. We dare to read our way into its epic contours.”
“The images are so vivid, so visceral, and so primal, they keep replaying in my head like scenes from a gripping movie. Primal because they hook right into those gut-wrenching sensations: falling, entrapment, drowning, suffocation.”