Open 24 Hours

Don Precosky teaches English at the College of New Caledonia and is the
co-editor of Four Realities: Poets of Northern B.C.

Open 24 Hours comprises work by five poets: Anne Burke, D.C. Reid,
Brenda Niskala, Joe Blades, and rob mclennan. Each poet’s section
contains an author photo, an “Author Statement,” and a biography. In
the introduction to the book, the contributors give reasons for their
pooling of resources: “Because we believe in poetry. Because we’ve
been stockpiling our poems. Because the Canadian Poetry Pool doesn’t
exist. Because our poems need a good home.”

It seems they’ve come together out of economic necessity more than
anything else. Unable to publish poetry collections individually, they
have done so collectively. Frankly, four of the five poets strike me as
unexceptional. The one who stands out is Brenda Niskala. Her poems have
a tough, skeptical objectivity about them. And because she can command a
variety of voices, the people in her poems tell their own stories in a
convincing manner. She deserves her own book.