In his first book since the Griffin-shortlisted Why Are You So Sad?, David W. McFadden offers up a gross of sonnets that display his trademark wit, mischief, curiosity, and quirky wisdom. A tour de force of compression, these brief poems Ñ as full and satisfying as his longer narrative works Ñ explore politics, religion, love, and poetry itself, with cameo appearances by Charles Bukowski, Jesus Christ, George Bowering, and Junichiro Tanizaki. Be Calm, Honey is at once deeply humanistic, poignant, and funny as hell, plainspoken, philosophical, and outrageous. Now into his fifth decade of writing, McFadden shows us what it is to live a life devoted to poetry.

David W. McFadden has been publishing poetry since the early 1960s. Why Are You So Sad? Selected Poems of David W. McFadden (Insomniac Press) was shortlisted for the 2008 Canadian Griffin Prize for Poetry, and Be Calm, Honey (Mansfield Press) was shortlisted for the 2009 Governor General’s Award for Poetry (his third such nomination). In 2013, McFadden won the Canadian Griffin Prize for Poetry for What’s the Score? (Mansfield Press). He is the author of about 30 books of poetry, fiction, and travel writing. McFadden lives in Toronto.

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Mid-life, for poets Ð like anyone else Ð is a time of existential crisis. The deaths have started to pile up; the poet begins to rehearse his own. For some poets this means elegies and admonitions. But Corrado Paina writes directly to the dead, not about them: in his poems they share space with the living. And his response to his own mortality is not lectures but love poetry: to those same dead, who include friends and parents, and to his very much alive children and wife. And, as always, he writes letters to his city. An eloquent social critic and satirist, he has painted the city visceral red, orange, and purple. Now he adds green, the colour of tenderness. Corrado Paina's poems are as passionate, funny, angry and bawdy as ever; middle age has hardly pacified him, instead he's intensified his palette with a note of sweetness.Ó (Diana Fitzgerald Bryden)