Sprocket is a series of breathless prose-poems capturing poet Al Rempel's childhood adventures spent roaming free in the idyllic setting of Arnold, BC, a small farming community tucked into the corner of Vedder Mountain, near the US border. Each poem presents a snapshot of one or two memories, sometimes involving the author’s siblings, his two “summertime only” school friends, or any number of other local characters. From climbing up the mountain “with handholds wet with moss and banana slugs” to finding the best way “to run full blast through a cornfield just before harvest,” Rempel takes his readers through an age where, as long as you were home by suppertime, you could go almost anywhere on your bike.

Al Rempel’s books of poetry are Undiscovered Country, This Isn't the Apocalypse We Hoped For, and Understories, along with four chapbooks: Behind the Bladed Green, Deerness, Four Neat Holes, and The Picket Fence Diaries. His poems have also appeared in a variety of journals and anthologies, most recently, the Cascadia Field Guide and Sweetwater: Poems for the Watersheds. Rempel has collaborated in the creation of a number of video poems with other artists; We Have Become Children and I’ve In the Rain were screened at film festivals in North America, and Sky Canoe was screened in North America as well as internationally at festivals in Dublin and Bristol. Some of Rempel's poems have been translated into Italian and Spanish. Rempel was awarded the Prince George Regional Arts and Culture Award for poetry in 2012 and shortlisted for the Fred Cogswell award for excellence in Poetry in 2013. His poems have been included twice in the Poetry in Transit project in Vancouver and shortlisted in 2015 for Arc’s Poem of the Year. In conjunction with the Federation of British Columbia Writers, he has led a series of online poetry workshops under the banner of Interior Dialogues. More information can be found at his website: www.alrempel.com.

Al Rempel's profile page

“Rempel’s poems ‘wake up to a new ache in our bones waiting for the sun to light up our place in the world’ and transport us to lives lived outside, from fields to forests, train tracks to manure pits, the base of mountains and streams swung across on the branch of a cedar. This is a once-upon world of paper routes, go-carts and gumboots, peopled by those who spin their days through bike spokes or seem to be always running, ‘rolling through barbed wire fences into ditches as night closed in.’ These poems invite us into this world until we too wonder ‘what would happen to us and did the universe go on forever.’ Sprocket reminds us that the fleeting ache and wonder of the everyday—floods, frogs, snakes, scrapes and all—can be a ‘plainsong divine.’”

—Laisha Rosnau, author of Little Fortress

“A kaleidoscope of images in language running loose and free yet always with intent and narrative force, Rempel’s Sprocket hurls us into the world of boys on bicycles who only stop to ask: Where does the universe end? A great delight that triggers memory and returns us to the wholeness of childhood.”

—David Zieroth, author of first here and then far, selected poems 1971-2024

“In run-on tumbles of full blast exuberance, Al Rempel leads us in a gang racing through the greening superlatives of youth. Throughout Sprocket’s crackerjack prose-poems, play reigns supreme ‘because what kind of afternoon is it if you don’t build harbours in the mud with the microbes and ditch weeds and bugs.’ The unassumingly artful piling up of imagery subtly invokes reflection upon who we were in that distant past. Sprocket takes us back to when the door to the future was wide open: ‘like we could go anywhere’—reading it feels like an infusion of youth.”

—Kevin Spenst, author of A Bouquet Brought Back from Space

“These poems are condensed blocks of run-on, overlapping narratives, all phrases and lines, moving in and out of scenes, like poetic dream memories, all the while creating amazing rhythms that carry one along toward those beautiful endings that often cast an unexpected perspective on the whole poem. The poems move through childhood until one day the child’s glove doesn’t fit anymore, and the sandbox is left behind.”

—Patrick Friesen, author of Reckoning