Hurry - Only 2 left in stock!
|
Elizabeth Bachinsky was born in Regina, Saskatchewan, in 1976 and grew up in northern British Columbia, the Yukon, and BC's Fraser Valley. In 2004, she received an honourable mention for the Bronwen Wallace Award for Poetry. She lives in the suburbs of Vancouver where she is the poetry editor for Event magazine.
The poems cover Bachinsky's family history and Stephen Leacock's
casual racism, Canadian internment camps and forced starvation in
the old country. The Bread Basket of Europe gives new, terrifying
meaning to a cliché I often heard growing up. She makes poignant
use of the word Holodomor (or "murder by hunger," referring to the
millions who starved to death under Stalin).
-Quentin Mills-Fenn, Uptown Magazine, Winnipeg's Online Source for
Arts, Entertainment & News
As readers, we are enriched by this careful willingness to ask, to
interrogate. Reading God of Missed Connections means to follow a
curious line of questioning, but one leading to lasting rewards:
those of witnessing a private and public history combine,
transform, and ultimately mirror our own.
--Spencer Gordon, Mansfield Revue
Reminiscent of Gwendolyn MacEwen's "Dark Pines Under Water,"
Bachinsky's poem "God of Missed Connections" employs changing
metaphors to reveal her conception of the nature of the mind and
unconscious. Unlike MacEwen's poem, which creates an implicit
metaphor in the landscape it describes, Bachinsky likens the mind
to a alluvial plain with layers of geological markings, only to
depart from this ingenious concept and find another analogy in
"split obsidium," whose variant smoothness becomes an image for the
mind looking back at itself.
-Gillian Harding-Russell, Prairie Fire
Bachinsky is unafraid to divulge her impressionable nature as a
seeker of truth, rather than a professor of it. Many poems are
strikingly original and candid; others can be coy, opaque. At its
best, Bachinsky's work is a shining example of how poetry can be
more revelatory than prose.
-BC Bookworld
Ukraine's troubled history is at the centre of this book. The
explosion of nuclear reactor number four at the infamous Chernobyl
plant infuses Bachinsky's poems with its destructive,
future-eradicating energies ... enviably good.
-Mark Callanan, Quill and Quire
Form-wise, Bachinsky is still at play in God of Missed Connections,
incorporating everything from lyrical incantations and dramatic
monologues to terse journal entries and passages quoted from
archival sources. But there's nothing playful about her subject
matter. Bachinsky lays bare many sorrows in what she calls 'the
midden' of her heritage, including the catastrophic nuclear
meltdown at Chernobyl in 1986 ... She also focuses on the
internment of Ukrainian Canadians in labour camps in Banff during
the World War I ... Elsewhere, themes of loss and hunger are echoed
obliquely in poems about contemporary urban life. (In her
postscript, Bachinsky explains that she felt engaging with the past
required her to give a sense of her own time and place. This is
convenient, since her greatest strength is her sharp, sardonic way
with modern vernacular.) ... God of Missed Connections is
Bachinsky's way of planting a signpost. It leaves a distinct
impression.
-Barb Carey, The Toronto Star
There's a confident, edgy humour throughout the collection, in
spite of the darkness of the subject matter, and on the whole
Bachinsky balances the tone precisely. Her control over form - and
her willingness to bend form when necessary - ultimately make God
of Missed Connections a deeply moving and tremendously satisfying
read.
-Mitchell Parry, The Malahat Review
Like the journeys she describes, Bachinsky leads the readers on a
difficult yet rewarding path through a people's history, through
personal stories, and through her own life. There is however,
something beautiful and human about the conflicted pilgrimage that
she has captured here that ought to be read and ought to be
remembered.
-Nick Schuurman, Re:verse
God of Missed Connections (Nightwood, 2009) is Elizabeth
Bachinsky's third collection of poetry and the follow-up to 2006's
Governor General's nominated Home of Sudden Service (Nightwood,
2006), which won unanimous praise from critics across the country
due, in large part, to its mixing of taught formal structures and
sassy-sexy, rough-and-tumble, colloquial language that made
available the unique psychological depths of otherwise fungible
characters, particularly young people in the habit of
self-eulogizing their lost youths far too early. With God of Missed
Connections, Bachinsky broadens her scope, turning to a more
dauntingly large subject matter: what T.S. Eliot dubs the "cunning
passages" and "contrived corridors" of history - in particular, the
history of Ukrainians in Canada. As she writes in her "Postscript,"
"The history of Ukraine and of Ukrainians in Canada is fraught with
tragedy, warfare, ethnic conflicts, racism, anti-Semitism,
political intrigue, ecological disasters." Smartly, Bachinsky
balances the inevitable listing of history's ethnic ship by
considering the Ukrainian-Canadian experience vis-à-vis her own
family ...
-Alessandro Porco, Northern Poetry Review
The best books of poetry build a self-contained world of reason and
meaning through the order of the poems ... Boundaries between
nationalities, discourse levels and histories become permeable
through the pacing of this book ... What we see in [God of Missed
Connections], and what is illuminated, we can't shake off.
-Elee Kraljii Gardiner, Poetry Is Dead
This author left me wanting more ... unique and effective. Good
job, Elizabeth. You have been an agent of healing and that, after
all, is the goal of all healers, all poets.
-Rena Hanchuk, ACUA Vitae
Elizabeth Bachinsky's God of Missed Connections offers up a history
worth thinking about. Beautiful, sprawling and melancholy, the book
is a discovery of the author's Ukrainian ancestry that calls up the
complicated and diasporic evolution of a transient people.
Bachinsky's poetry is loose but careful as she thumbs over
memories, real and imagined, of her family's migration to Canada
during the First World War.
The volume leads us through their journey, from starving,
impoverished days in a war-stricken Ukraine, to years spent in a
Canadian internment camp, to Bachinsky's own fretting and fawning
in present-day Vancouver. The troubled and neurotic search for
origins is a common theme in Canadian poetry, and why shouldn't it
be? Our vast country resists the definition of a national
personality, leaving plenty of space for questioning. The problem
is the self-indulgent book that introspectively paws over family
stories, with only a nod to literary or philosophic concerns.
Thankfully, Bachinsky adds value to the genre, having produced a
work that is equally a study of heritage and the nature of memory
itself. A lesson on the latter is artfully prescribed in the
titular poem, "God of Missed Connections," where the poet likens
the mind to stone on which nothing can stick or grow, and to glass
that does not reflect--absorptive, and self-absorbed. This alert
consideration of the modern mind is pertinent to Bachinsky's
interest in the poet's obligation to history. When our internment
camps have been cleared out, grown over, and are opened to the
public as national parks, Bachinsky wonders, do we have a
responsibility to keep writing about the past?
Unequivocally, the answer is yes. After all, history repeats itself
in surprising and unexpected ways. The poem "Young Faggots"
suggests that only "faggots knew what it was like to watch everyone
they love die off, just like that," hinting that the war may be
over, but our human struggle persists. God of Missed Connections is
a formidable work from this young poet: a considered and important
contribution to the quintessential dialogue on Canada's fractured
collective history.
-Deanne Beattie, Vancouver Review
A collection of poems that is just as charming read to onself as
read aloud. Chernobyl, bad jobs, family connections, identity,
swimming and beauty written against the alternating backdrops of
Vancouver, Regina, Belarus ... For anyone who craves poetry, a
lovely and inspiring gift.
--Recommended by Megan Adam at Advent Books
Miscommunication can lead to missing something that could have been
magical. God of Missed Connections is the third collection of
poetry from Elizabeth Bachinsky, an award-winning and widely
published poet. Her acclaim is not unfounded, as readers will soon
find out and enjoy reading God of Missed Connections.
-James A. Cox, Midwest Book Review (Wisconsin)
Bachinsky has won deserved admiration for her work, full of guts
and verve, spunk and nerve. She utilizes a straight-shooting,
straight-talking vocabulary and combines it with the world-weary
wisdom of a Ukrainian, a people who have experienced grievous
injustice in all ways ... Bachinsky's third poetry collection [has
that] rough beauty, sinuous toughness, of make-do carpentry that
works.
-George Elliott Clarke, Halifax Chronicle-Herald
![]() |
Ask a Question About this Product More... |
![]() |