Earth Prime

Chris Knight is an editor at the Toronto-based Canadian HR Reporter.

Bert Almon’s funny and thoughtful free-verse ramblings constitute a
sort of inner travel diary. While they take their inspiration from the
external—Johnston Canyon in Alberta, a train leaving Albuquerque,
Grecian ruins—they travel their own paths of memory and wry
observation. In “Magazines of the ’50s,” the poet writes,
“Sometimes in a rage my mother would get out the old shotgun and
threaten me with it / If she had known where to buy shells and how to
load them / I could have taken refuge against the broad side of any
barn.” Almon’s poems do not take themselves too seriously, nor do
they struggle for easy humor or shy away from darker thoughts
(“recollections are only / the earth that’s left over / when the
grave is filled”).