Neighbourhood Cleanup
We poke through
the streets
A man heading
out to his car
points
at garbage
on his lawn
“You missed
a spot,”
he snarls
My bag collapses
My face melts
Endless sunshine
Endless garbage
Spring Cleaning
Marshall Bood
March 2021
This is poetry of the emotional, psychological, and social fringes.
Paul Chambers
Spring Cleaning is an urban trek through the liminal spaces of schizophrenia and drug addiction, excavating childhood memories and the struggles of poverty and bad jobs. Marshall Bood’s first poetry collection, this chapbook’s forms range from free verse to haiku, senryu, and tanka.
About the Author
Marshall Bood lives and works in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada. He has published poems since 2002 in journals and anthologies such as CV2, Grain, and The Body Electric Anthology (Ars Omnia Press). He has published haiku, senryu, and tanka in journals and anthologies such as bottle rockets, Presence, and The Red Moon Anthology.
Praise
Spring Cleaning is littered with vivid, often profound, glimpses into life in the urban margins. This is poetry of the emotional, psychological, and social fringes, observed with a finely measured empathy and a deeply moving honesty.
Paul Chambers
In Spring Cleaning, Marshall Bood provocatively invites us to ask ourselves: what is a fragment—of text and of life? What is a scrap of a poem, a scrap of our world? In doing so, he artfully counters the dominant, destructive forces of our times, which devalue patient crafting, careful attention, tender preservation, and the reimagining of worth, the vital practices Bood fosters and that his poems are certain to inspire.
Daniel Scott Tysdal
Marshall Bood’s poems in Spring Cleaning read like polaroid snapshots, focusing on a moment and stripping an entire world bare in just a few delicate words. I found myself re-reading stanzas over and over again like returning to a photo album, seeing something new every time.
Daniel Zomparelli, Founder of Poetry Is Dead
Marshall Bood has maybe outdone himself with Spring Cleaning! This cavalcade of poems are like no one else’s. Bood navigates—on each page—through the human condition and takes the reader to unchartered places. His poems are simply captivating and meditative. I highly recommend Spring Cleaning.
Stanford M. Forrester, Editor of bottle rockets press & former president of the Haiku Society of America
In the News
Publication Details
Chapbook
Hand-bound. 32 pp, 5 x 7 in
Publication Date: March 01 2021
Distribution: Asterism Books (US)