Invisible Foreground traces a journey from childhood into an adult world that is filled with tenderness, terror, and the wish for secure familial surroundings. Always on the verge of disappearing into a fractured memory the speaker is both sure and unsure of, these poems embroider lived reality with dreams of the imagination. Suburban houses, provincial terrain, furniture, feelings, physical desire (among other things) all serve, in the mind of the poet, as emotional set designs for a half century of life as performance.

David Bateman is a Toronto-based poet, painter, and arts journalist. He has taught creative writing at various universities across Canada. His four collections of poetry, as well as a collaborative long poem (with Hiromi Goto) were published by Frontenac House Press (Calgary) from 2005 through 2014. His first novel, DR SAD, was published by the University of Calgary Press in November of 2020. A collection of short stories & creative non-fiction entitled A MAD BENT DIVA – an anagram for the author’s name – was published by Hidden Brook Press (Brighton) in 2017.

David Bateman's profile page

• Short-listed, Stephan G. Stephansson Award for Poetry