4/23/2018

BC Poetry 2018: ""Oh Not So Great": Poems from the Depression Project" by Rob Taylor (Leaf Press)


Bob Dylan Setlist

Bob Dylan and his band were in town. He is one of my musical heroes so I had 14th row floors. I had been looking forward to it for weeks and then the day of the show, I couldn't do it. I spent the next couple hours in tears because I knew then that by not going there was something really wrong. It brought me down to a place where I thought: it's got me by the throat now.
- M.K.

Don’t Fall Apart On Me Tonight
Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright
Worried Blues
Tangled Up in Blue
Blowin’ in the Wind
Mix-Up Confusion
What Was It You Wanted?
Sitting on a Barbed Wire Fence
Going, Going, Gone
I Threw It All Away
Abandoned Love
Too Much of Nothing
Never Gonna Be the Same Again
Everything is Broken
Tears of Rage
What Good Am I?
You’re No Good
A Fool Such as I
Seeing the Real You At Last
When You Gonna Wake Up?
Someone’s Got a Hold of My Heart
He Was a Friend of Mine



Who?

Rob Taylor is the author of the poetry collections The Other Side of Ourselves (Cormorant Books, 2011) and The News (Gaspereau Press, 2016), which was a finalist for the 2017 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. Rob was the recipient of a 2015 City of Vancouver Mayor’s Arts Award, as an emerging artist. Oh, and he runs this blog!


What?

"Oh Not So Great": Poems from the Depression Project is a collection of 30 poems on depression, broken into nine sections: sadness, poor sleep, loss of interest, guilt, low energy, poor concentration, abnormal appetite, psychomotor retardation/agitation, and suicidality (known by the medical acronym SSIGECAPS). All of the poems are inspired by, or drawn from, the transcripts of group discussions between people living with severe depression.

"These poems are the result of a years-long project designed to create for physicians a doorway to empathy with patients who suffer from mental illness. As it turns out, they open that door wide for us all. Here are people speaking from deep within the isolating world of depression, their stories transformed into poetry by Rob Taylor’s considerable talents. From the heart-rending admission to a friend in the first poem (It’s the one gift / I do give you, every day / I don’t call), to the final lines (You walk alone / across the room, sit by the fire, / and wait there for the longest time), this collection unveils a reality lived by far too many people, one most of us don’t know how to handle — not when we experience it ourselves, not when loved ones are going through it. Read this book. It will help."

—Sandy Shreve, author of Waiting for the Albatross and Suddenly, So Much


When?

Launched in Vancouver in January 2018, launch to come in Coquitlam in June. Details TBA.


Where?


Purchase from the Leaf Press website or at your local bookstore. $16.95


How?

Creating a doorway.



The copyrights of all poems included in the series remain with their authors, and are reprinted with the permission of the publishers.


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