Sitcom

I am in Montreal and have borrowed a copy of local writer David McGimpsey's Sitcom from a friend. I read it as we walk up Rachel Street toward the optometrist's at Saint-Denis where I am to pick up my new glasses. The city is all around us as we sit at the reception, surrounded by glass and, just beyond the glass, snow and crowded streets.

Todd Swift's blog, Eyewear, just ran an in-depth review of David McGimpsey's Sitcom.

This is not a book of poems about TV as much as it is about the memory of TV, the way time spent in front of the tube bleeds into the time spent away from it. What you get in former Coast TV columnist McGimpsey’s Sitcom is a resonant image of the headspace -- the thought patterns -- created by much TV watching as one way of living in this day and age.

The greatest trick David McGimpsey has ever played on Canadian poetry is convincing it that he doesn't exist. It could be argued that the 'I' in Sitcom, (the poet's fourth collection) which is at times a novelistic jaunt through gender dementia and vocational satire, is interpretively transcendent.

As suggested by the compound title, Montrealer David McGimpsey's book Sitcom is poetry as cold fusion, combining elements that, at first glance, don't seem to belong together: traditional poetic form and pop-culture content, literary allusion and TV, playfulness and seriousness, respect and irreverence, the lyrical and the deadpan.