Henry's Creature: Poems and Stories on the Automobile

Don Precosky teaches English at the College of New Caledonia. He is the
co-editor of It’s Still Winter, an online journal of contemporary
Canadian poetry and poetics, and Four Realities: Poets of Northern B.C.

Henry’s Creature is an entertaining and charming collection of poems
and stories about the automobile. It would seem that everybody has a
story to tell about a car. Cars have been the location of death, birth,
conception, and pretty much every other important milestone in a
person’s life. Marty Gervais once had an ongoing antagonism with a
mechanic named Ron (“The Galaxy”). Robert Hilles lost a group of
high-school friends when their car crashed through the ice of Lake of
the Woods (“Going Through the Ice”). Hugh MacDonald looks back on
his first car (a Pontiac Beaumont) and first marriage, and wryly
observes that “marriage licenses / are easier to acquire / than
driving permits” (“Beaumont”). Car buffs and general readers alike
will enjoy Henry’s Creature.