Home of Sudden Service [Unabridged] [Paperback]

Elizabeth Bachinsky (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 8, 2006

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2006 GOVERNOR GENERAL'S AWARD

"Elizabeth Bachinsky is one of those rare poets capable of negotiating poetic forms with rigour and testing their limits, while never losing sight of the strange, dark music of what it means to be human. We should expect great things from her." --The Globe and Mail

Home of Sudden Service is a sad and scary book of punk rock villanelles and sonnets about delinquency.

Set in Anyvalley, North America, Home of Sudden Service centres around the experiences of young people growing up in the suburbs. The contrast of elegant poetic forms with the colloquial, often harsh language of suburban teens makes for a compelling and engaging achievement.

Bachinsky creates a gothic landscape that will be familiar to anyone who's visited the suburbs. Here, young Brownies dance, learn to sew and get badges in a series of eerie rituals, and smalltown girls settle down early. Murder, lust, teen pregnancy and a young man's disappearance are all discussed with a matter-of-fact, dispassionate voice.

But this world is not without humour and hope. Home of Sudden Service concludes with "Drive," a series of fifteen sonnets about the poet's trip across Canada with her sister -- and out of the setting of their youth.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Imagining T.S. Eliot returned, in a Canadian woman's body, as a punk rocker, takes you only partway to grasping Bachinsky... Her project, in Home of Sudden Service, is to explore the voices of the disenfranchased... Elizabeth Bachinsky is one of those rare poets capable of negotiating poetic forms with rigour and testing their limits, while never losing sight of the strange, dark music of what it means to be human. We should expect great things from her."
--Jeanette Lynes, The Globe and Mail

"It's rare to encounter a book of poetry that so nimbly balances accessibility and craft as this second collection by Elizabeth Bachinsky. Drawing on apparently vast reserves of hipster angst, Bachinsky portrays the struggles of the young with a skillful mix of ironic detachment and saucer-eyed immediacy... Two villanelles, a glosa using P.K. Page, several handfuls of punchy free-verse narratives and a single prose piece round out the collection, evincing a young poet concerned with tradition, but possessing an experimental impulse that gives her work a countercultural thrust... [Bachinsky is] a writer worth not only watching, but reading."
--Stewart Cole, Quill and Quire

"The up-and-comer on this year's [Governor General's Literary Award for Poetry] list is Elizabeth Bachinsky... Home of Sudden Service is just her second collection... She gives the grungy, trailer-park feel of this material an intriguing tilt by setting it within the strictness of traditional forms like the sonnet... the GG nod ensures that her book will get some deserved attention."
--Barbara Carey, CBC.ca Arts

"...the poems in Home of Sudden Service give voice and breath to growing up in the wilds that exist from the suburbs to almost rural, in small town writing of teenage hijinks, failures, successes and those furtive dreams of eternal escape. In poems that exist between childhood and adulthood, between dream and goal, Bachinsky writes of the delinquent teens who will one day become respectable old men, working the same job their whole lives, but still living in that place where everything is still potential, and nothing is actual; each poem existing in that underlying bubbling of sensuality and sexuality, bursting to get through."
--rob mclennan

"In Home of Sudden Service, Elizabeth Bachinsky salutes poetic forebears by name and, more deeply, by singing the strict forms forward. I love this book for the music in its voices and also for its tough and tender normalization of misfit lives. Misfit? Who among us survives the so-called formative years bearing no mark of the outcast? Anybody interesting? So I found myself wondering as I read and re-read this gorgeous, affecting book. Delighted and appalled, I see myself in it."
--Stan Dragland

"Her acute attention to place asks us to look again at the suburbia so easily dismissed... to desire the places where we grew up, places we both yearn for and long to forget."
--Jacqueline Turner, The Georgia Straight

BC Bookworld --Various

About the Author

Elizabeth Bachinsky was born in Regina, Saskatchewan, in 1976 and grew up in northern British Columbia, the Yukon, and BC's Fraser Valley. She published her first book of poems, Curio: Grotesques and Satires from the Electronic Age (BookThug) in 2005 and her work has appeared in In Fine Form: The Book of Canadian Form Poetry (Polestar, 2005), Whitewall of Sound: Contemporary Canadian Concrete Poetry (housepress, 2003),
and Pissing Ice: "New" Canadian Poets (BookThug, 2004). In 2004, she received an honourable mention for the Bronwen Wallace Award for Poetry. She lives in the suburbs of Vancouver where she is the poetry editor for Event magazine.

Photo: Dave Aharonian

Product Details

• Paperback: 78 pages
• Publisher: Nightwood Editions (March 8, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0889712123
• ISBN-13: 978-0889712126
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 7.6 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.5 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,650,461 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An engaging collection of Elizabeth Bachinsky's insightfully intimate poetry, May 8, 2006

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Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Home of Sudden Service (Paperback)

Home Of Sudden Service is an engaging collection of Elizabeth Bachinsky's insightfully intimate poetry. Showcasing some of her best work, Home Of Sudden Service assaults barriers with a kind of subversive poetry that will be especially appreciated by the discerning reader. Night Voices: I want the chilled blue/nights I gave to girls I'll never see again./I want their long cool limbs,/the faint movement their bodies made beside me,/rain on the flysheet of our tent, a lake below/us, dark and quiet, but for night/birds--bats--hurtling through the bent/branches above. I want my girls back-/lit by the moon then warmed/by the campfire we built together./I want their secrets. To hear/their high laughter from a distance/among the trees, so far from the houses where/we lived, we felt free.