Midlife Action Figure: Poems

by Chris Banks

Overview

Banks’s stunning new collection, exploring bold frontiers

“ Midlife Action Figure delivers surprise, delight, and sense.” – Quill & Quire , starred review

“Poetry is an act of mischief,” Theodore Roethke famously once said, and Chris Banks takes this as his credo in Midlife Action Figure . His subject matter ranges from the familiar to the surreal, taking readers through poems that are both wondrous and strange, heartfelt and humorous, controlled and impatient. Whether calling a tree “an anthology of leaves” or describing time as “a Fisher-Price View-Master of ‘first kisses’ and ‘no return’ policies,” Banks approaches writing as if anything might make for alarming, strange, and dizzying verse.

Banks knits together wit with wildly inventive imagery as he follows his poems outside convention where they play with stolen matches. Capable of both deep introspection and the quick turn of phrase, he places his tongue firmly in his cheek as he looks for a measure of human wonder in this intermission between TED Talks and the apocalypse. Midlife Action Figure is a tour de force for anyone looking for that rare book that is as exciting as it is provocative, showcasing both pathos and humor, while it explores what it means to be alive in the early 21st century.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781770415058
Publisher:	ECW Press
Publication date:	09/24/2019
Pages:	72
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.25(d)

About the Author

Chris Banks is a Canadian poet and author of four previous collections of poems, most recently The Cloud Versus Grand Unification Theory (ECW Press 2017). His poetry has appeared in The New Quarterly , Arc Magazine , The Antigonish Review, Event, The Malahat Review , and Prism International , among other publications. He lives and writes in Waterloo, Ontario.

Read an Excerpt

Time’s Atlas

Some people treat each day like IKEA instructions.

Others look for a higher dimension in church pews.

Hot yoga studios. Time is an atlas. A Fischer-Price

View-Master of first kisses and “no return” policies.

I wish this was even more poetic. Throw in the phrase

In Media Res like a trial balloon. A benediction. A spark-plug.

Another celebrity has overdosed on alcohol and benzos.

Every story deserves a splashy two-page spread. Despite

Old Navy ads and tooth-paste for sensitive teeth, the heart is

a scourge. My spirit-animal is a scarecrow. The first-person

singular feels wrong here, but the hive-mind, all that buzzing,

overwhelms me. How many different ways to say Hallelujah?

I think we would all feel better if we were allowed to fall apart

one day out of the year. If only we could burn the briefcases.

I miss the sound of cicadas. Electric dusk. What do they care

about the end of post-modernism? Birth of narrow-casting?

Everyone has a few words they would like to bury forever.

I am losing landmarks as I get older, but thankfully we can

google it all. The little white house on a hill overlooking

the highway needs a new coat of paint but it is still there.

The uranium mine, the miners, are gone. If you feel yourself 

going crazy, you probably are. Only a little. Young men

in black and white photographs, wearing soldier uniforms

or baseball attire, stare out stoically from the back wall

of dimly-lit bars and taverns. Today, wellness programs

preach resiliency like they are selling hamburgers. I keep

turning the pages of Time’s atlas. I trace its illustrations

with my fingers. The contoured lines. The last pages

blank, then something, new shapes, a lost continent,

new ports of call. A secret harbour, or a penal colony.

I mark a big X where the future will make landfall.

Table of Contents

One,
Time's Atlas,
Museum of Failures,
Ivory Towers,
Witnesses,
Stolen Matches,
Queue,
Tom Swift,
Gulag,
Green Spider Tattoo,
Simulation,
Reading So-and-So's Selected Poems in a Used Bookstore,
Scrapbook,
Thunderdome,
The Beggar,
The Book of the Dead for Dummies,
Two,
Honesty,
The Interview,
The Good Samaritan,
Threat Detector,
New World,
Lay Believers of the Metaphysical,
Garnish,
Living Will,
Jade Pendant,
The Laboratory of Aesthetics,
Subject Matter,
Romance,
Notices,
Say-So,
Crusade,
Three,
Big Questions,
Emergency Broadcast System,
History,
Vacation,
Twenty-First Century Self-Portrait,
Elegy or New Deal,
Conversation,
Merry-Go-Round,
The School,
Midlife Action Figure,
Master Narrative,
Geocaching as Spectator Sport,
Common Myths,
Oasis,
Kintsugi,
Acknowledgements,
About the Author,
Copyright,

Editorial Reviews

Midlife Action Figure  delivers surprise, delight, and sense; Banks slams sly one liners as though he were competing in a professional wrestling match . . . The result is breathlessly entertaining and gut-punchingly wise . . .  Midlife Action Figure  is an insightful tour through the human experience, crafted in clear and specific imagery that captivates the imagination and the intelligence. It is a book that begs to be read and reread.” — Quill & Quire Starred Review

“[A] spirited, wide-ranging collection.” — Toronto Star

 “A dense, electric collection filled with whip-smart lines and crackling imagery.” — Winnipeg Free Press

“‘The laboratory of aesthetics / these days is really about mischief / and surprise’ writes Chris Banks in this collection of cheeky, pointed dicta on everything from how to survive an emergency to enduring a job interview, amid surreal admissions that the speaker has a ‘minor crush on Saturn's moons’ or possibly suffers a ‘slow leak’ as each year his ‘heart grows an extra ring.’  Midlife Action Figure  is a book of solid poems from the centre of existing, through deep space and the places in the mind like ‘Matryoshka dolls’ that endlessly nest into their own allusiveness, returning with a yield of essential observations and imperatives for the continuance of the earth.” — Catherine Owen, award-winning author of  Designated Mourner

“‘My spirit guide is a scarecrow’; ‘guilt is everyone’s personal gulag’; ‘can I coat-check this malaise?’; ‘death is classically trained’: Chris Banks builds poems out of short sentences that are like photons, little packets of energy full of aphoristic punch and surprise. He delights in the swings of imagination, in the way every next image or idea can plow new ground even as it alters the meaning and feel of what has preceded it. The result is a constant state of euphoria, an ongoing demonstration of the swerve and swirl of human consciousness. ‘A river is a correspondence course’ — as with so many lines here, my recognition that I’ve never thought of it that way is followed immediately by the sensation that there’s no other way to see it, that I am being shown the truth.” — Bob Hicok, award-winning poet and author of  Elegy Owed

From the Publisher