Sweetheart of Mine

Bring on the banjo! This is poetry with strings attached. In his abcediary based on bluegrass standards, Monty Reid passes through the soundhole into the listening body, into the echo chamber of corpus and corpse. Like the best bluegrass lyrics, these poems reach with great simplicity into the heart of things, where they touch their own mortality, and sing high and lonesome anyway. Taut as mandolin strings, they vibrate between inside and outside, between presence and desire, between Old Joe Clark and Little Maggie and a healthy dose of Bill Monroe in between.

Monty Reid was born in Saskatchewan, lived in BC, Alberta and Quebec, and now resides in Ottawa, where he is Director of Exhibitions at the Canadian Museum of Nature. His works include Karst Means Stone (NeWest), Crawlspace (Anansi), The Alternate Guide (rdc), Flat Side (rdc), Dog Sleeps (NeWest) and the chapbooks Fridays (sidereal), Six Songs for the Mammoth Steppe (above/ground) and Cuba: A Book (above/ground). His poetry, as well as essays on natural history and museums, has appeared in many journals for the past 25 years. He has played guitar and mandolin in the bands Blues Formation, Blue Lonesome and the Exhibitionists.