In Andy McGuire’s poetry, we are bombarded with images, from birds to Floridians, mosquitoes to beaches underneath boardwalks. Readers must duck and weave, eluding their sharp edges and simultaneously hoping to catch them like raindrops. McGuire’s poems have appeared in Riddle Fence, Hazlitt, and The Walrus. He earned the right to appear at the Bookworm Literary Festival after winning the first-ever Poetry Games held at the International Festival of Authors in Toronto.

Books available at The Bookworm:

Country Club (2015)

Events at The Bookworm Beijing:

Friday, March 18, 8 pm: Voices of Canada, with Dionne Brand, Michael Crummey, Anakana Schofield; moderated by Nathan VanderKlippe

Sunday, March 20, 4 pm: The Meaning of Contemporary Poetry, with Michael Crummey, Mariko Nagai, Nicholas YB Wong; moderated by Simon Shieh

Select Opening Lines:

From “Pool,” the leading poem from Country Club:

I’m too tired to care today.
It costs too much to care what you say.
I love you too much to care anyway.

…

Two Poems:

“Minor Kingdoms”

Drifting with my Daisy
One lazy afternoon,
The world was a fall fair
Where you shoot balloons.
I took aim.
The bird epilepsied from the rafters,
Left eye socket usurped
By a silver pellet.
To see it suffer was not
What I was after.
It was embarrassing.
I cocked and shot
Until my Daisy shook.
I lost count of the shots it took.

~

“The Bomb”

The beautiful bombs
In the dresses
On the dance floor
Are the sort of bombs

Worth going to war for.
Manley puffs out his chest,
Oppenheimer’s khakis show
Signs of civil unrest.

They have mankind on the mind.
It’s a bird, it’s a plane,
It’s a shame
Bombs are so bad at charades.

Big bombs are passé,
IEDS are all the rage.
A drone a day
Keeps the big bombs at bay.

I make my body
A bomb,
It’s the best way
To get my chest off.

I’m your man,
I open up
At the bomb’s behest,
In the flash of a lifespan.

Book Synopsis, from the back jacket:

A lyrical wilderness of power, wealth, leisure and desire, the poems of Country Club freewheel across state lines with panache and flagrant feeling. In this bold debut from Andy McGuire, all passions – even unpleasant ones – stare down the barrel of a world in which freedom is the fifty-first state, and love is the eleventh province.

Andy McGuire is an author participating at the 2016 Bookworm Literary Festival. To read about other participating authors, please see our Meet an Author series.