The November Optimist is almost a love story. Combining fiction, observation and anecdote, its male narrator conjures a dialogue with a woman–his imagined counterpart, his willing or unwilling muse who sometimes lends insight, sometimes remains contrary and elusive. Full of jaunty humanity and black humour, our narrator registers ironies in a light-hearted manner when bemusements arise from his fully engaged citizen-walkabouts and caffeine fantasies. Ordinary events (driving and parking, walking and watching) are transformed by minute representation into something of almost surreal importance. The conversation extends beyond the woman to the city itself, to rain and seasonal change, to books and the escape they offer, the ways they inform what is possible and what is daily. Clouds and quays, neighbours and strangers absorb our narrator, as does fast time in both his city and in himself in this flâneur’s look around.

David Zieroth’s The Fly in Autumn (Harbour, 2009) won the Governor General’s Literary Award and was nominated for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize and the Acorn-Plantos Award for People’s Poetry in 2010. Zieroth also won The Dorothy Livesay Poetry Award for How I Joined Humanity at Last (Harbour, 1998). Other publications include the trick of staying and leaving (Harbour, 2023), watching for life (McGill-Queen’s, 2022), the bridge from day to night (Harbour, 2018), Zoo and Crowbar (Guernica Editions, 2015), Albrecht Dürer and me (Harbour, 2014), The November Optimist (Gaspereau, 2013), The Village of Sliding Time (Harbour, 2006), The Education of Mr. Whippoorwill: A Country Boyhood (Macfarlane Walter & Ross, 2002) and Crows Do Not Have Retirement (Harbour, 2001). His poems have been included in the Best Canadian Poetry series, shortlisted for National Magazine and Relit Awards and featured on Vancouver buses three times as part of Poetry in Transit. He watches urban life from his third-floor balcony in North Vancouver, BC, where he runs The Alfred Gustav Press and produces handmade poetry chapbooks twice per year.

David Zieroth's profile page