Vancouver for Beginners

Winner of the 2020 Western Canada Jewish Book Awards, The Lohn Foundation Prize for Poetry

In Vancouver for Beginners, the nostalgia of place is dissected through the mapping of a city where readers are led past surrealist development proposals, post-apocalyptic postcards, childhood landmarks long gone and a developer who paces at the city’s edge, shoring it up with aquariums.

In these poems you will traverse a city lined with rivers, not streets. Memory traps and tourist traps reveal themselves, and the ocean glints, elusive, in the background. Here there are many Vancouvers and no Vancouver, a city meant for elsewhere after the flood has swept through. This place of the living and the dead has been rewritten: forests are subsumed by parks, buildings sink and morph, and the climate has changed.

Vancouver for Beginners is a ghost story, an elegy, a love song for a city that is both indecipherable and a microcosm of a world on fire.

AUTHOR

Alex Leslie

Alex Leslie is from Vancouver. Her chapbook of microfictions Twenty Objects For The New World was published by Nomados Press. Leslie’s writing has been published in many Canadian literary journals and in the Best Canadian Stories anthology series (Oberon Press). She has won a Gold National Magazine Award for personal journalism and a CBC Literary Award for fiction.

Reviews

“A magnetic collection that must be read over and over.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Leslie’s poems are ingenious and complex, following versions of Vancouver past, present, and future… Every poem is assured, every word chosen for its weight, and the result is a beautiful collection that is both inspired by, and lamenting for, a city that is never satisfied.” —Canadian Literature