Pop music jingles, statistics, the frames of text and camera selecting the world’s headlines for our perusal. A stroll along the Champs Elysees jammed against the slum of Kibera — A Bad Year for Journalists feeds the jagged, seductive language of media into the emotional cusinart lives of the media’s flawed and courageous practitioners. To say what it was not what it was like.

Lisa Pasold's profile page

• Short-listed, Alberta Book Awards Trade Fiction Book Award

Lisa Pasold has been thrown off a train in Belarus, been fed the world’s best pigeon pie in Marrakech, and been cheated in the Venetian gambling halls of Ca’ Vendramin Calergi. She grew up in Montreal, which gave her the necessary jaywalking skills to survive as a journalist. Her two books of poetry, Weave and A Bad Year for Journalists, were both nominated for Alberta Book Awards; her debut novel, Rats of Las Vegas, was described as “enticing as the lit-up Las Vegas strip and as satisfying as a winning hand at poker” by The Winnipeg Free Press. Lisa has taught creative writing at the American University in Paris and now divides her time between France and Toronto. Her latest book of poetry, any bright horse, was a finalist for the Governor General's Award.

By turns sympathetic, critical, darkly funny and painstakingly lyrical, the poems trace journalistic travels in the Middle East – “places at their best dismantled” – and overlay the national and geographical settings with characters and anecdotes so vivid the reader feels as if she might be at home in these places after all… In an increasingly hyperbolic idiom where everything is so conveniently unspeakable, Pasold speaks up, conveying more than impressions or exaggerations; these poems explain “what it was/ not what it was like”
~Katia Grubisic, The Globe and Mail