How do we navigate a world of fast-food joints, big-box stores and traffic jams, where people grandstand in the deli and homeless men announce the end of the world through "slats in the sky"? Where the cumulative result of our lifestyle is a gyre of garbage and plastic in the North Pacific? Al Rempel's This Isn't the Apocalypse We Hoped For addresses this concern with humility and compassion, as it takes us above the trees in a sky canoe and into the city, asking us to receive each kindness and press it close, while we journey across this earth we've inherited "with the tilt and skew of athletes."

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

• Short-listed, Fred Cogswell Award for Excellence in Poetry

“Rempel is a master at setting up straw men and then knocking them down. These are oral performance tricks, played almost pitch perfect. Reading this book is like watching both the poems and Rempel onstage, playing the crowd.”

—ARC Poetry Magazine