In these thoughtful, yet playful poems, Belford builds a poetry experience for the curious reader can open anywhere, read, and read on.

Although the phrasing of his lines is unusual, Ken Belford’s poetry is not easily forgotten. His poetry collections, like this one, his slick reckoning, are experiences the curious reader can open anywhere, read, turn the page, and read on. It’s not necessary to begin at the beginning nor to read to the end to get a good sense of what this poet is about. Read a little, or read a lot, he’s worth it.

Ken Belford is a timber framer. He has managed a northern wood lot, from which he has milled his own lumber, carrying out most of the timbers for his buildings on his back. These thoughtful, yet playful poems tell of powerful connections artfully made, of an earned sense of how things work, and an intimate awareness of the cycle of all things.

Ken Belford was born to a farming family in Alberta and grew up in Vancouver. For more than thirty years, he, along with his wife and daughter, operated a non-consumptive enterprise in the unroaded mountains at the vicinity of the headwaters of the Nass and Skeena Rivers.The “self-educated Lan(d)guage” poet has said that living for decades in the “back country” has afforded him a unique relationship to language that rejects the colonial impulse to write about nature, but speaks from the regions of the other.“The conventional standards of narrative and lyric poetry give me nothing. The intention of the sequences I write is to assemble words that can be messaged to the habituated souls of the city from the land-aware that live outside city limits.”Currently living in Prince George, British Columbia, with his activist wife, Si, Belford continues to write outside the boundaries of the conventional forms of the various schools of poetry.His seven previous books of poetry are Fireweed, The Post Electric Caveman, Pathways Into the Mountains, lan(d)guage, when snakes awaken, Ecologue, Decompositions, Internodes, and Slick Reckoning.

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