Home of Sudden Service: Poems - Softcover

Bachinsky, Elizabeth

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0889712123 ISBN 13: 9780889712126

Publisher: Nightwood Editions, 2006

Synopsis

Contains punk rock villanelles and sonnets about delinquency. Set in Anyvalley, North America, this book centres around the experiences of young people growing up in the suburbs. It concludes with 'Drive', a series of fifteen sonnets about the poet's trip across Canada with her sister - and out of the setting of their youth.

About this title

Review:

Imagining T.S. Eliot returned, in a Canadian woman's body, as a punk rocker, takes you only partway to grasping Bachinsky... Her project, in Home of Sudden Service, is to explore the voices of the disenfranchased... Elizabeth Bachinsky is one of those rare poets capable of negotiating poetic forms with rigour and testing their limits, while never losing sight of the strange, dark music of what it means to be human. We should expect great things from her.
--Jeanette Lynes, The Globe and Mail

It's rare to encounter a book of poetry that so nimbly balances accessibility and craft as this second collection by Elizabeth Bachinsky. Drawing on apparently vast reserves of hipster angst, Bachinsky portrays the struggles of the young with a skillful mix of ironic detachment and saucer-eyed immediacy... Two villanelles, a glosa using P.K. Page, several handfuls of punchy free-verse narratives and a single prose piece round out the collection, evincing a young poet concerned with tradition, but possessing an experimental impulse that gives her work a countercultural thrust... [Bachinsky is] a writer worth not only watching, but reading.
--Stewart Cole, Quill and Quire

The up-and-comer on this year's [Governor General's Literary Award for Poetry] list is Elizabeth Bachinsky... Home of Sudden Service is just her second collection... She gives the grungy, trailer-park feel of this material an intriguing tilt by setting it within the strictness of traditional forms like the sonnet... the GG nod ensures that her book will get some deserved attention.
--Barbara Carey, CBC.ca Arts

Don't let Elizabeth Bachinsky's smart-ass hipster lyrics and tough-girl sentiments distract you from her technical prowess. She knows not only how to hot-wire and fine-tune a poem, but also how to provide just the right blend of sound, image, and torque to make it move.
--Gary Geddes

You will recognize much about the young lives in Home of Sudden Service, but you won't find the usual gloss. Here is a poet who knows how to shake things up. Meter! Grit! These are urgent poems, inscribed in skin. You will hear them long after you have put this book down, but you will feel them even longer.
--Sina Queyras, editor of Open Field: 30 Contemporary Canadian Poets

...the poems in Home of Sudden Service give voice and breath to growing up in the wilds that exist from the suburbs to almost rural, in small town writing of teenage hijinks, failures, successes and those furtive dreams of eternal escape. In poems that exist between childhood and adulthood, between dream and goal, Bachinsky writes of the delinquent teens who will one day become respectable old men, working the same job their whole lives, but still living in that place where everything is still potential, and nothing is actual; each poem existing in that underlying bubbling of sensuality and sexuality, bursting to get through.
--rob mclennan

In Home of Sudden Service, Elizabeth Bachinsky salutes poetic forebears by name and, more deeply, by singing the strict forms forward. I love this book for the music in its voices and also for its tough and tender normalization of misfit lives. Misfit? Who among us survives the so-called formative years bearing no mark of the outcast? Anybody interesting? So I found myself wondering as I read and re-read this gorgeous, affecting book. Delighted and appalled, I see myself in it.
--Stan Dragland

Her acute attention to place asks us to look again at the suburbia so easily dismissed... to desire the places where we grew up, places we both yearn for and long to forget.
--Jacqueline Turner, The Georgia Straight

Bachinsky's poems have energy, with lines jumping out and forcing you to listen to whatever she wants to say. Most of the work is short and immediate, the effect being like a juicy piece of gossip. What is so intriguing about her poems is that they are written about everyday events in a straightforward narrative voice. As a result, she presents a collection that feels truthful, real and spontaneous. Home of Sudden Service is a book of poems that will make you smile and critically think about life in suburbia, a place where many of us live out everyday life as well.
--Taryn Hubbard, JIVE Magazine

The same thing strikes me in all of [Bachinsky's] poetry: the strong, deliberate voice, the attention to detail, the tone - by turns poignant, funny, or fierce. Her combination of a fearless approach to taboo subjects and a strong, narrative voice, drew me instantly to her work.
--Amy Borkwood, The New Quarterly

Synopsis:

This is a sad and scary book of punk rock villanelles and sonnets about delinquency. Set in Anyvalley, North America, the book centres around the experiences of young people growing up in the suburbs. The contrast of elegant poetic forms with the colloquial, often harsh language of suburban teens makes for a compelling and engaging achievement. Bachinsky creates a gothic landscape that will be familiar to anyone who's visited the suburbs. Here, young Brownies dance, learn to sew and get badges in a series of eerie rituals, and small-town girls settle down early. Murder, lust, teen pregnancy and a young man's disappearance are all discussed with a matter-of-fact, dispassionate voice. But this world is not without humour and hope. "Home of Sudden Service" concludes with 'Drive', a series of fifteen sonnets about the poet's trip across Canada with her sister - and out of the setting of their youth.

About this edition

• Publisher: Nightwood Editions
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0889712123
• ISBN 13: 9780889712126
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 78