Love is complicated, and Chris Pannell has captured the sharp pain and deep affection of a son for his parents as they age and slip away from him. In lines that are clear, honest and specific, he unpacks the family histories that bind him to his past. From corgis to seafaring uncles to Christmas trees, he charts the path of his parents' descent, with the heartbreaking question of his mother ringing in our ears, asking him, and all of us, "Christopher, are you going to take me home?"

Along with love and loss, this is a book about our own aging. Our own, inevitable, death. Pannell writes of seeing close friends die unexpectedly, watching elderly couples as they travel together. He considers wheelchairs, walkers, lost memories and rests for a few moments in the contemplation of great art. Pannell details it all unsparingly, but with a great humanity. The ocean is crossed and recrossed, the LPs are sorted and disposed of, and in the end the stars hold his fear.

Chris Pannell has lived in Hamilton since 1988. He has published six previous books of poetry; A Nervous City (2013) won the Kerry Schooley Book Award from the Hamilton Arts Council. His last book, Love, Despite the Ache (2016), won Poetry Book of the Year from HAC. Drive (released in 2009) won the People’s Poetry Award the following year. Pannell is also the author of a set of three poetry broadsheets, which won the Hamilton and Region Arts Council Award in 1997.

He is a former DARTS bus driver, a former technical writer, and has hosted and helped run the Lit Live Reading Series in Hamilton for twenty years. Between 2015 and 2017 he edited the US academic journal The Oxfordian, an annual publication of the Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship, which encourages discussion of the Shakespeare Authorship Question. From 1993 to 2005 he ran the new writing workshop at Hamilton Artists Inc. and edited two book-length anthologies for the group.

Chris Pannell's profile page

"The poems are a finely balanced dialogue between empathy and detachment. Death is shockingly extraordinary, yet banal, common. Although everyone is born with a life sentence, the endings are as variable as punctuation marks." - Northumberland Today

"I read Pannell's new book and found his words deepy moving." - The Hamilton Spectator

"Also impressive last night was Chris Pannell, who conveyed a series of grief-laden pieces with aching clarity." - Now Magazine