The Trailer

Poetry

About the book

As they explore love and life balanced on the edge of a city, in a mobile home perched precariously, metaphorically on the fringe of society, the poems in The Trailer dig past the daily detritus of the forsaken lover's world of tin-walled hope and melamine dreams to reveal humour, beauty, and joy.

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About the author

James Scoles holds degrees from North Dakota, Arizona State, and Southern Illinois, and he has lived, worked, and travelled in over 90 countries. His writing has appeared in the literary journals Prairie Fire Magazine, CV2, The Malahat Review, en Route Magazine, Descant, and Arc: Canada’s National Poetry Magazine and the anthology Coming Attractions 13. His poem “The Trailer” won the 2013 CBC Poetry Prize and his literary non-fiction has won the Personal Journalism and Western Magazine Awards. He now lives in Winnipeg where he teaches creative writing and literature at the University of Winnipeg and helps run a small 120-year-old family farm.

Excerpt

Scar tissue

Open these old wounds easy
as memories—the indelicate
album of crevices I’m left to
care for—and listen to the
sea of love still spilling my
blood, playing my bones
and singing its song
of havoc so sweetly
through broken skin.

She got my heart

and I got the sofa, her
dresser, the kitchen table,
two poorly-put-together
pieces of furniture. Scrabble.

All the books, mean looks;
a freezer-burnt old bottom-
feeder we meant to cook,
bake into our not-so-sodden

moments and memories;
I joked: a whole little sole
to help my broken soul heal.
One eye, big, wet and cold—

the fish’s, not hers—still
follows me. It always will.

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