John Terpstra chronicles the unfolding of our everyday lives with a playfulness and easy intimacy reminiscent of poets like Alden Nowlan and Al Purdy, his conversational style belying his careful control of language. Whether he’s exploring the spiritual or the temporal, the present or the past, the animate or the inanimate, Terpstra approaches his subjects with a mix of curiosity and empathy, attuned to how the right words can “begin innocently enough / to thread through the fabric of our lives.”

John Terpstra has published many books and chapbooks of poetry, the most recent of which, Disarmament, was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award in 2004. A retrospective of his work, Two or Three Guitars: Selected Poems, was published in 2006. Terpstra has also published three prose projects: Falling Into Place, a creative investigation of a giant glacial sandbar which lies beneath one of Canada’s busiest transportation corridors; The Boys, or, Waiting for the Electrician’s Daughter, the story of his wife’s three brothers, who lived with muscular dystrophy until their early twenties; and Skin Boat: Acts of Faith and Other Navigations, a frank reflection on faith and church in a secular era. He lives in Hamilton, Ontario.

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