Puppet Poems

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.

Allen Bell is a Victoria visual artist and writer. These two books were
my introduction to his writing and I was favorably impressed. They are
composed mostly of short line poems usually with a first-person narrator
who is sometimes the author, sometimes a character from history, and
sometimes fictional. The poems, though not offering a wide variety of
styles, do cover a wide range of topics including social commentary,
word portraits of political and historical characters, and personal
experiences. Both books are strongly concrete and often take a
journalistic tone.