It’s a Big Deal!

So many things seem like a BIG DEAL: buying clothes, food trends for healthfulness and coolness, what’s trending online, your personal problems, what someone else has said, the political landscape, an Instagram post, avocado toast. This list could go on and on. What’s a big deal to someone might be nothing to another. It’s a Big Deal! questions the way modern society values, interprets, and roasts or embraces these ideas. How do these big deals affect us, and the way we interact with others? Is the way we measure “bigness” different than it used to be? Does it mutate as time goes on? From popular trends in health and wellness to the big deals of life like death and work, love and politics, and into the extinct megafauna that used to walk this earth, this book looks at the ways we interpret those things. This collection is wry, sensitive, bitchy, and honest. With a unique voice that holds humour and heart, the poems reflect the ever-changing big deals we encounter in the world.

AUTHOR

Dina Del Bucchia

Dina Del Bucchia is the author of the short-story collection Don’t Tell Me What to Do and of three collections of poetry: Coping with Emotions and Otters, Blind Items, and Rom Com, the latter written with Daniel Zomparelli. She is an editor of Poetry Is Dead magazine, the artistic director of the Real Vancouver Writers’ Series, and a co-host of the podcast Can’t Lit with Jen Sookfong Lee. An otter and dress enthusiast, she lives on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səl̓ilwətaɁɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) First Nations (Vancouver, British Columbia).

Reviews

“Genuinely funny poets are few and far between; in Canada, there was the great David McFadden. I remember him lamenting, “Well I made them laugh, I wish I could make them cry. Dina Del Bucchia can make you laugh.”
—Mary di Michele, Vallum magazine

“Dina Del Bucchia’s It’s a Big Deal “expos[es] how the… conflicting attitudes [of Christian rhetoric and nihilistic hedonism] underpin so much of modern North American culture.”
—Winnipeg Free Press

“There is no poet who writes quite like Del Bucchia – a ventriloquist with a pulse on our time.”
—Quill & Quire

“Canadian literature needs more such poets who are willing to be self-referential in this way. Who do not merely throw a temper tantrum at their proximity to the cultural, political and economic forces of capitalism but understand the risk that comes with mounting a poetics that goes beyond simply being mad or angry at the state of things. Del Bucchia’s poems here are a call for such a death knell to sound.”
—Canisia Lubrin, Hamilton Review of Books

“[It’s a Big Deal!] is a lovely, smart collection to read, especially when every little thing does feel like a big deal.”
—Arc Poetry Magazine

“Smart, funny, and a pure delight. I’m going to start giving this to people who don’t think they could ever like poetry!”
—Rebecca Rosenblum, Goodreads

“Del Bucchia’s lines brim with great play but they do not disavow the seriousness underpinning the neuroses of our time. This kind of reading is rare and It’s a Big Deal!” —Canisia Lubrin, Hamilton Review of Books