A clearance bin of corner-cut records, remaindered paperbacks, and cannisters of faded film, Phillip Crymble’s first full-length collection strives to rescue, celebrate, and preserve the works and sensibilities of those whose visions and values have been long overlooked by posterity. Crymble’s technical acumen, ear for music, and emotional sincerity are the adhesive agents that bring the vernacular ethnographies, high-brow ekphrastics, tender elegies, forlorn love lyrics, and acutely observed accounts of plain and seemingly unremarkable domestic experience together in this formidable debut.
Working in forms and approaches as varied as conventional Sapphics, blank-verse sonnets, and telegraphic collage, and from a personal poetics informed as much by Larkin, Bukowski, and Kees as by the writing of present day innovators like Simon Armitage and Sean O’ Brien.
Phillip Crymble lives in Fredericton, New Brunswick, where he serves as a poetry editor for The Fiddlehead. The recipient of several Canada Council for the Arts Professional Writer’s grants and a finalist in both The Poetry Business and South Tipperary Arts Centre’s annual chapbook competitions, his work has appeared in numerous other publications worldwide.