Warrior worked for over thirty years at the sharp end of production in B.C. as a logger, commercial fisherman and union activist.

M.C. Warrior’s book is a fine collection of new poetry and poems only previously found in magazines, anthologies and in the chapbook Quitting Time published by McLeod Books in 1978. They range from poetry about working on the coast—commercial fishing, logging, environmental campaigner—to the political meaning of work, and wry and deft observations on topics ranging from Buddhism to Ovid in the afterlife. Warrior was an IWA logging Camp Chairman, UFAWU Organizer (United Fishermen & Allied Workers Union), Lead Strategic Researcher For LiUNA (Labourers’ International Union of North America) and Executive Director of a Habitat for Humanity affiliate.

A poet, a former logger and fisherman, and a lifelong trade unionist, M.C. Warrior was a founding member of VIWU, (the Vancouver Industrial Writers’ Union) along with Tom Wayman, Kate Braid, Kirsten Emmott, Phil Hall and others. He is also author of Building the Power: A History of the Labourers’ Union in British Columbia. This is his long awaited first book of poetry.

M.C. Warrior's profile page

“Warrior is a veteran BC poet whose first book has been far too long in coming. His poems serve as a reminder there is a whole world of experience out there that seldom makes it into books, a vivid world of whipping cables, bleeding alders, physical exhaustion and the blessed relief of a quitting-time whistle. Mark's book has been well worth the wait."–Howard White, author of A Mysterious Humming Noise.

M.C. Warrior’s poems, each wrought with the mastery of a journeyman tradesman, bring to engaging life the perspectives garnered from the many disparate threads of his life: classics scholar, logger, commercial fisherman, trade union activist and historian, father, husband, and, yes, literary craftsman. The poet’s sense of history runs deep—whether the consolations or lack thereof from Greek or Oriental philosophers, or how our working lives remain shadowed by the mindset and practices of the Industrial Revolution. By turns surprising, moving, comic and self-revelatory, Warrior’s poems offer rueful wisdom, hard-earned insight, and far-from-naïve but convincing inspiration to imagine and struggle for a better world.”–Tom Wayman, author of Watching a Man Break a Dog’s Back: Poems for a Dark Time.

M.C. Warrior—like Peter Trower, Tom Wayman and others before him—gives us sharp and fascinating insights into the everyday and sweaty work world—dark, difficult and dangerous—of his three decades logging and commercial fishing in BC. He reminds us, “History itself requires a regular spring cleaning.” But a worker is more than just their work, and Warrior shows us that too.—Kate Braid, author of Journeywoman: Swinging a Hammer in a Man’s World.