The idea of being a customer or observing customers forms the basis of these poems which range from a child's perspective to descriptions of daily life.

Born at Medicine Hat, Alberta, in 1959, Yvonne Trainer has become one of Canada's most distinctive young poets. A brilliant reader, she has presented her work to many appreciative audiences in the Prairies and Atlantic Canada, while her poems have appeared in a number of leading literary magazines in both Canada and the U.S.A. CBC Anthology broadcast a group of six poems in 1980, when she was still an undergraduate at the University of Lethbridge, editing Whetstone and putting out her chapbook, Manyberries, also in 1980, before moving on to the University of New Brunswick, where she received the M.A. degree in English and Creative Writing.

Yvonne Trainer's profile page

"Not only versitile, but fresh and delightful to read."

<i>The Lethbridge Weekly</i>

"Yvonne Trainer's book Customers should be on school library shelves if only to show children that poetry does not have to be all about white doves and fluffy clouds and newborn lambs. More importantly, it reaffirms the wonder of common things, which children have really known all along, but which school tends to make them forget."

<i>NSSLA Bulletin</i>