Full Magpie Dodge is about the shiny brightness of modern urban life, its pressures and joys. More-or-less artful dodgers populate its pages, along with office workers, crows, exhausted junkies and jubilant lovers. Intertwined with all their lives is the unforgotten rural past and the still turbulent North; in short, it's a book that takes Canadian life as it is: startlingly robust, enduring, and sometimes beautiful.

Praise for Full Magpie Dodge:

"All creeping power and miraculous handling, Full Magpie Dodge is a damned fine piece of machinery... " (Michael Holmes, author, Watermelon Row)

"To Neff we are not beautiful minds slowed in the flesh, but 'animals with problems.' Neff extends the urban jungle metaphor into a thematic, reminding us of our institutional organics, of our market index of the daily movement of bodies, of the wildness that proliferates within the order of the metropolitan grid ... Neff asserts his intention to soldier in the army of 'artists of complaint, dissenters, the grievance stricken,' echoing such anti status-quo voices as Irving Layton's or Charles Bukowski's." (Canadian Literature)

"There's enough humour, self-loathing, and joie de vivre here to satisfy Bukowski's fans, but Neff's the far better craftsman. If you thrill to what words can do when stacked right, drop 14 bucks on Full Magpie Dodge. Five books down the road, this kid'll be big-league. Get in on the ground floor and grin." (Fast Forward Weekly)

Lyle Neff's work has appeared in subTerrain, Geist, Prism International, Adbusters Quarterly, Canadian Dimension and Seventh Wave. His first collection of poetry,Ivanhoe Station (Anvil Press), was a finalist for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. Also published by Anvil Press are Full Magpie Dodge and Bizarre Winery Tragedy. Neff lives and works in Vancouver.

Lyle Neff's profile page