Kingsway

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

Kingsway is Vancouver’s oldest thoroughfare. This book of poems is
about “the way” of Kingsway: the life, mood, and rhythms of the
space it crosses.

Kingsway runs at a 45-degree angle to the city’s traffic grid. And
these poems, like Kingsway, are oblique. They approach things
indirectly—with nuance, with wordplay, with insinuation, and with wit
and irony. When driving in Vancouver I’ve always found Kingsway
unsettling: none of its intersections are right angles, so traffic comes
at you, like these poems, from surprising directions.

In the book, Turner makes considerable use of found materials from the
scene—names of businesses, graffiti, phrases from billboards. He
captures Kingsway’s urban desperation; for most of its length, it’s
unfashionable—a crowded first-landing-place for immigrant groups, a
last refuge for people who are down on their luck.

The collection’s language, thought, and images have a liquid flow,
like the flow and rhythm of traffic on a busy street, and like the flow
and rhythm of an exploited place where the route is a constant but where
every single thing along the route is subject to change, tearing down,
and redevelopment: “something rising up / where the car lot was one /
more thing for sale there now / ... / they’re pile-driving they’re
pile-driving / having to pile-drive Kate says because / the soil’s all
loose where the creek once was” (“Sit Down. Look Up. Make Notes for
Antiquity”). You don’t have to be from Vancouver to enjoy this book;
you just have to like good poetry.