“Few if any poets encompass the range, the dynamism, and the spectrum of emotional colours Barry Dempster does.”

— Jury citation Canadian Authors' Association, for The Burning Alphabet, winner of the 2006 Jack Chalmers Award

“'Is it narcissistic to want a / personal relationship with everything?' Barry Dempster wonders in his latest poetry collection. This desperate yearning for intimacy pervades the book, lending an air of wistfulness and melancholia to its otherwise playful tone. Whatever the answer to his question, Dempster strives to make intimate connections "with everything" (in poems whose subjects range from office parties and mid-life crises to coyotes and herb shops).

His search is a stay against oblivion, against the figure of Death with his "full-body frown." It's an existential angst that is relieved only by contact with the physical world. "Just touching a chair / these days is a kind of embrace," he writes in "Happy to be Cold." The commuter in "The Empty Seat" is gripped with almost pathological feelings of emptiness until a fellow passenger finally takes the seat next to his. Disembarking, the commuter brushes "against / every shoulder, every open hand," as if that slight human contact will anchor him to the earth.”

— Quill & Quire