Nominated for The Pat Lowther Award
Prior to the success of Going Down Swinging, Billie Livingston was primarily known as a poet, with a seven-year pedigree of publishing her poems in literary journals around the world. After finishing and promoting her best-selling novel, she turned her focus back to poetry. The Chick at the Back of the Church brings together her best poems in a long-awaited first collection.
As a poet, Billie drives straight for the sharp edges--from the rough, self-assured and brash voice of a woman who poses nude at seventeen while considering the 40-year-old photographer as her guinea pig, to the confidante of relatives, and friends grappling with the tortured frustration of love, sexuality, adultery and death. These jagged realities also collide with the innocence of childhood--a toddler being offered LSD from the next-door neighbour, a Catholic schoolgirl being dropped into the frontlines of a fierce abortion protest and an elementary student just trying to practice her reading in the park but instead facing unwelcome "exposure." Livingston also includes a selection of poems written from the disparate voices of the same self-destructive family that eventually developed into the characters of the popular novel.
Reviews:
“Meet (Livingston’s) comic alter ego in this first collection of poems that probably has the ghost of Lenny Bruce clapping from a back booth. Livingston gives us shots of the hard stuff, but served chilled and always with a twist.”
“A powerful debut collection, The Chick at the Back of the Church tears through memory, long legs flashing, dust aflyin’.”
“When the skin horripilates, the mouth goes dry, and you feel (as Rilke put it) the past breaking out in your heart, you know this is poetry. Billie Livingston’s The Chick at the Back of the Church is this rare, lightning-striking kind of poetry.”
“Livingston builds her strong narrative instinct into blackjack poems that work more like prose than poetry. Sexually, these poems are highly charged, yet remain morally ambiguous — like sex under fluorescent lights: exposed. Every moment of humour and titillation allowed the reader is skillfully yanked away lines or pages later, creating an overall air of uncertainty and doubt.”
“Billie’s the shit. She’s a damn solid writer who will make your head spin and your knees buckle....she has a way of capturing the push and pull of family dynamics, and demonstrating the way some fleeting events can linger with us, like bleeding tattoos.”
“One of the top five favourite Canadian books on love and sex, guaranteed to sizzle your bedsocks.”
“These are narrative poems with good energy, told in plain yet powerful language, offering concrete images for us to chew over long after the last line has been read.”
“The everyday mundane is extraordinary here and the everyday problem has apocalyptic overtones. These poems are good, and there isn’t a single gardenia or lonely wandering cloud in sight.”
“If the “chick” who appears in various guises throughout this collection, should ever be in danger of “going down”, you can bet your boots it will not be without a fight.”
“Evokes early Michael Ondaatje”
“Evokes early Michael Ondaatje”-- Danforth Review