“Brilliant lunatic assemblage.” — Today’s Book of Poetry on Cut-up Apologetic

From 2007 to 2016, Jamie Sharpe led an itinerant life, throughout British Columbia and the Yukon, in Sechelt, Prince George, Dawson, Salmon Arm, Whitehorse, Galiano, and Texada Island. When family life solidified around a sedentary existence, old scattershot suggested new targets …

By way of time’s amnesia, we’ve almost lost Sharpe entirely; only a few of his worm-eaten books remain in the musty libraries of literary perverts. The great record of Canadian literature is a list of prestigious “-ists” and “-isms” (the Realists gave way to Naturalists, replaced by Symbolists, affronted by Dadaism, bled into Surrealism, birthing the Post-Absurdist-Nouveau Roman … ). Some authors are so diverse we struggle to contain them with a name. Here’s hoping we can drag the ever-distinct Sharpe, against his will, without proper receptacle, into the future for a few years more. (The Associative Press)

Part roman à clef, lies, composite, and compendium, Everything You Hold Dear is an ode to poetry and a posthumous work from a living writer.

Jamie Sharpe's profile page

Jamie Sharpe is the author of three other collections of poetry: Animal Husbandry Today, Cut-up Apologetic, and Dazzle Ships. He lives in Comox, B.C.

“Everything You Hold Dear is jam-packed with juicy, bright insights, observations as terrible and incisive as the best stand-up comedy … Sharpe has been slowly building a largely overlooked body of work over the last few years, and this might be his most well-crafted, minimal and sharp volume yet, filled with darkly humorous lines and a goat’s head’s worth of bitter blood.” — Winnipeg Free Press