A follow-up to his acclaimed The Porcupinity of the Stars, Moon Baboon Canoe is filled with Gary Barwin's trademark humour, invention, musicality and craft and continues his exploration of family, modern life, nature, wonder, philosophy, and the absurd.These witty and surprising poems confront subjects as diverse as time machines, elves, hummingbirds, birth and cows yet manage to explore perennial themes of poetry: delight, mortality, childhood, love, the natural world, and squirrels. It is a baboon-paddled canoe of a book guided by the moon, and a round each bend in the river we find the sources of our strength, consolation, goofiness and joy.

The author of more than twenty books of poetry, fiction and books for children, Gary Barwin is a writer, musician and multimedia artist from Hamilton, Ontario and the author of the nationally bestselling novel, Yiddish for Pirates (Penguin Random House Canada) which won the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour, the Canadian Jewish Literary Award was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Governor General’s Award; and For It is a Pleasure and a Surprise to Breathe: New and Selected Poems, ed. Alessandro Porco (Wolsak and Wynn, 2019.)
A finalist for the National Magazine Awards (Poetry), he is a three-time recipient of Hamilton Poetry Book of the Year, has also received the Hamilton Arts Award for Literature and has co-won the bpNichol Chapbook Award and the K.M. Hunter Arts Award. He was one of the judges for the 2017 CBC Poetry Prize. Barwin has been Writer-in-Residence at Western University, Hillfield Strathallan College and McMaster University and the Hamilton Public Library. His writing and recordings have been published/released in hundreds of magazines and journals internationally—from Readers Digest to Granta. He is on the organizing committee for Hamilton’s LitLive Series and regularly presents, performs and exhibits in the city.

Gary Barwin's profile page