In childhood, the world seems vast, mysterious and unsettling as we attempt to meaningfully locate ourselves in its midst, and what belonging we find in adulthood is often but a veneer covering that irresoluble desire to understand “the desperate invocations of your little wanting heart.” In his poems, Tim Bowling writes with unapologetic honesty about our complex consciousness of the world and of the increasingly disconnected state of human experience, seeking always to snag on something elemental– “something in the forest / and the self–a hunger– / like a barbed hook in the jaw of the salmon.”

Finalist for the 2015 Robert Kroetsch City of Edmonton Book Prize.

Tim Bowling has published numerous poetry collections, including Low Water Slack; Dying Scarlet (winner of the 1998 Stephan G. Stephansson Award for poetry); Darkness and Silence (winner of the Canadian Authors Association Award for Poetry); The Witness Ghost; and The Memory Orchard (both nominated for the Governor General's Literary Award). He is also the author of three novels, Downriver Drift (Harbour), The Paperboy's Winter (Penguin) and The Bone Sharps (Gaspereau Press). His first book of non-fiction, The Lost Coast: Salmon, Memory and the Death of Wild Culture (Nightwood Editions), was shortlisted for three literary awards: The Writers' Trust Nereus Non-Fiction Award, the BC Book Prizes' Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize and the Alberta Literary Awards' Wilfred Eggleston Award for Non-Fiction. The Lost Coast was also chosen as a 2008 Kiriyama Prize "Notable Book." Bowling is the recipient of the Petra Kenney International Poetry Prize, the National Poetry Award and the Orillia International Poetry Prize. Bowling was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2008. A native of the West Coast, he now lives in Edmonton Alberta. His latest collection of poetry is Tenderman (Nightwood), due out in fall 2011.

Tim Bowling's profile page