• Winner of the 2022 Lansdowne Prize for Poetry
• Longlisted for the 2021 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award

Joel Robert Ferguson grew up in a family of working-class evangelical Baptists in the Maritimes and found an escape from that parochial world in literature. In his twenties, that escape became literal, as he hitchhiked across the country, working odd jobs. These experiences are reflected in his first poetry collection The Lost Cafeteria.

The idea of place and transience forms the core around which the poems in this collection orbit. Stylistically, the poems vary, but often strive for a synthesis between experimental and traditional. Ferguson’s sonically dense political poems and elegies confront the ways in which working-class masculinity is used by capitalism and white supremacism.

On-the-Job Braining
How to be a body for eight hours.
How to build a better boss. How to accrue.
How to speak softly on a city bus.
How to exploit chaos. How to lift a woman.
How to re-gift the things peopel give you
in their moments of despair. How to love
a peon. How to identify
as a consumer. How to hear an important
voice. How to take a biology lesson
based around a recently-extinct species.
How to live in fire. How to live on hot dogs.
How to discourse. How to receive a message
from the Government of Canada.
How to monetize human suffering.
How to win and go on winning.

Paris Syndrome in New York
Poem: to be determined.
Poem: an archaeology of tomorrow.
Poem: it is sundown in America.
Poem: will I be as surprised
to be alive in a year as I was at thirty?
at fifty? 100? Poem: will I live
to forget this year's snows, should they come?
Poem: a clearing, morning mist,
a dark green forest, a JPEG
of a guard tower, glitched by artifacts. Poem: the last
leaves are falling. Poem: the adults aren't
around to tidy them up. Poem:
some Canadian bohunk at the heart
of empire and world culture
for the first time. Poem: roadrunner in Manhattan,
achieving escape velocity only
if he doesn't look down or back
(the coyote is Eurydice or maybe us.)
Poem: the museums keep us out and history in,
in theory. Poem: inconceivable vs unelectable
so obviously the former wins—
it's not a conceivability contest. Poem:
the future of [declarative verse] is that it has none.

Poem: I'm trying to be discreet but failing.
Poem: language has its own evil
intelligence. Poem like a ninety-percent
unoccupied condo tower. Poem: sans papiers
disappeared at Union Street Station. Poem, are we just
your plague rats? Poem, I'm sick
of listening o my own voice, go fuck
yourself and your atom bomb.
Poem, will you remember
my birthday when I'm decrepit?
I'm writing you now, Poem, and reading you out
in a walk-up mansard in Stuyvesant,
to hear and make you over the A.C.
in a friend of a friend's garret
near the former armoury's turrets.
Poem, it's well past midnight.

Poem, tonight Jordan Scott gave a talk
about Guantanamo Bay and played a tape
of an army medic glibly describing "enteral" feeding
Poem, a young Bobby Dyland has failed
us and we have failed ourselves.
Poem, the world has us
where it wants us. Poem, I'm overcome
by a want for new needs. Poem, I don't even
like milk or molly. Poem, can I ask
if a cartography of nightfall is the best
you and I can manage? Poem, I wish
you were about reading Catullus at the Starbucks
inside Trump Tower. Poem, I have only myself to blame.
Poem, lead us back to the dialect
of nuclear anxiety. Poem,
I remember reading I Remember
by Joe Brainard in Battery Park a couple nights ago.
For me, poem, please stick a pin in the future,
be for Catalonia again and for play as play,
stop pretending to be just an angineer of the human soul.
Poem, resuscitate Phil Ochs and stay
true to the memories of regional truths,
be an inconvenient something I'd like to catch
in the Egyptian wing of the Metropolitan Museum.
Poem, I think I know how this film ends.

Poem: the call was coming from inside the house.

The News
I imagine his head wrapped in bandages
like Apollinaire, lik Kenzaburo Oe
imagined his infant son's head wrapped
in bandages in A Personal Matter.
There're crow-caws and his voice

falters, choked-off, alien
Three years estranged submit to four
to eight weeks remaining. My mother says
a deer just walked past the driveway's mouth
that it's getting cold, that they're heading in now.