Bücher von Chloe Cocking

in march 2020, we decided that we would each write one poem a day for every day in april 2020 in honour of national poetry month.you may recall that period was considered the height of the lockdown in many places in north america- no one out on the streets, no one travelling to work or school. i stayed inside, along with my person and my cat, in a very tiny apartment. i worked from home. i had zoom meetings. i played scrabble with my person. (cat dislikes playing scrabble, so i knew it was pointless to ask her to join in). i banged on pots and pans every night at 7 pm in support of front-line workers who were risking their lives to keep the rest of us fed and as healthy as possible. along the way, i wrote 30 poems in 30 days. some are very obviously "covid poems". others are poems written during covid (rather than poems about covid). as i have worked on assembling this collection, i notice that all the poems have certainly impacted by the stillness, quiet, and terrifying peacefulness of those weeks. what bubbles to the surface when you coop up a poet during a pandemic? they think about things, drilling deeper ever deeper into themselves. this book contains some of the results.

"Honest, funny, timely little stories. Raw. These poems read as if composed of the broken speech scattered around the edges of a very big Quiet. Funny, insightful, playful and painful at times. Who is Hector? I'll let you find out." - Malcolm Van Delst, Author of Do the Wrong Thing "Cocking's poems are well-honed, like a scalpel. Sharp enough to slice cleanly to the heart; to dissect her subjects and lay them open for you to see their inner details." - Christine Grimard, Contributor to Saving Seeds "Hollering back at paltry domination, the poems in Hector transgress the fictions of now with rare and essential human things: truth, brilliance, thought and heart uncompromised. Here, intensities of knowledge & experience burst traditional confines and reset us, call us out, insist a world with all of us in it." - Shauna Paull, Author of roughened in undercurrent

Fables, Fictions, and Fantasies: A Compendium is a collection of thirteen short stories that feature several revenge schemes; three adventures in customer service; a few accidental deaths; a vegan stripper defending herself from zombie attack; and a little girl finding the cupcake of her dreams. Quill & Quire said: "What? We've never heard of her, sorry." The Georgia Strait said: "Stop sending us email, weirdo." Everybody else seemed to laugh while reading it, though. Except for the first story. And the one about pirates. And . . . ok, fine: everybody laughed at the funny ones, just not the ones that are kinda sad.