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Boom Time
Inspired by her time working in isolated construction camps in northern Alberta, Lindsay Bird’s Boom Time describes the unruly social space of the work camps and the ‘in-between’ state of existence that they create. Like any resource boom, Canada’s oil patch is awash in contrasts and contradictions—between risk and reward, isolation and assimilation, and wilderness and industrial intrusion. Deep in the oil patch, the luxuries of civilization—things like rules and objective facts—sometimes seem in short supply, but Bird’s poems attempt to chart a place where there “isn’t a decent map to be had,” sketching blurry boundaries between truth and talk, reckoning with rumours and half-truths heard around camp.
Boom Time shifts from passages of prosaic observation to rhyming word play and witty, imagistic asides. With this range of modes the collection offers contrasting accounts of the disorienting locale. A common thread throughout the collection is people’s uncanny ability to adapt to or resist the environments they throw themselves into—other than Donnie, who fell into a tailings pond and disappeared, becoming “a murmured lunchroom tale.” The characters populating Bird’s poems have both immediacy and inevitability, their complexities presented with little explication, judgment or endorsement, their stories narrated with compassion and humour. While her stance is most often one of amusement, Bird doesn’t shy away from the more troubling aspects of life in camp, touching on subjects like workplace safety, harassment, gendered violence, over-indulgence and infidelity.
Many travel to the oil patch in pursuit of prosperity, accepting the demands of the work, the isolation of the job sites and the sometimes stifled living environment in exchange for better wages than they could make at home. While the poems in Boom Time depict this as a world somewhat apart, they also acknowledge there’s something intriguing about this experience that we’ve willfully edited out of our everyday notion of the civilized world, and yet it has remained “just over / the hill this whole time.”
Boom Time shifts from passages of prosaic observation to rhyming word play and witty, imagistic asides. With this range of modes the collection offers contrasting accounts of the disorienting locale. A common thread throughout the collection is people’s uncanny ability to adapt to or resist the environments they throw themselves into—other than Donnie, who fell into a tailings pond and disappeared, becoming “a murmured lunchroom tale.” The characters populating Bird’s poems have both immediacy and inevitability, their complexities presented with little explication, judgment or endorsement, their stories narrated with compassion and humour. While her stance is most often one of amusement, Bird doesn’t shy away from the more troubling aspects of life in camp, touching on subjects like workplace safety, harassment, gendered violence, over-indulgence and infidelity.
Many travel to the oil patch in pursuit of prosperity, accepting the demands of the work, the isolation of the job sites and the sometimes stifled living environment in exchange for better wages than they could make at home. While the poems in Boom Time depict this as a world somewhat apart, they also acknowledge there’s something intriguing about this experience that we’ve willfully edited out of our everyday notion of the civilized world, and yet it has remained “just over / the hill this whole time.”
80 pages, Paperback
Published January 1, 2019
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
May 27, 2019
This was an excellent read. I'm sometimes mystified by poetry, but Boom Time was accessible and really entertaining in a complex way. I've never worked out west, but a lot of my friends have, and I was really curious to read a snapshot of what life was like in a place like Fort Mac. I really recommend this book.
September 13, 2025
A couple of years ago I had the good fortune to hear both Lindsay Bird and Kate Beaton speak while they were on tour together—Bird talking about Boom Time and Beaton talking about Ducks. Despite the different forms, their books cover the same basic experience: working on the oil sands of northern Alberta.
Smoke fumbles from
stack edge to sky end
in a twenty-four-hour
flutter. On the coldest days
it will separate into
nonsense curlicues.
This is where all the cursive
went when they stopped
teaching it
in school. (12)
Spare and evocative. Perhaps my favourite poem is "Garland", describing a man of that name who knows his job but not how to read, but my favourite lines are those ones about the twisting smoke. I read this not long after visiting my father's hometown in rural BC, where the landscape is dominated by a smelter and smoke and steam belch constantly into the sky.
It took me a while to find this—I'd look for it when I visited my mother and her wonderful library system, but the library kept losing it, and unfortunately I think it may be out of print now. But the library finally located their copy, and I was finally in the right place when that happened, and it's worth the read if you come across a copy, or if you read Ducks and want to hunt down related material.
Smoke fumbles from
stack edge to sky end
in a twenty-four-hour
flutter. On the coldest days
it will separate into
nonsense curlicues.
This is where all the cursive
went when they stopped
teaching it
in school. (12)
Spare and evocative. Perhaps my favourite poem is "Garland", describing a man of that name who knows his job but not how to read, but my favourite lines are those ones about the twisting smoke. I read this not long after visiting my father's hometown in rural BC, where the landscape is dominated by a smelter and smoke and steam belch constantly into the sky.
It took me a while to find this—I'd look for it when I visited my mother and her wonderful library system, but the library kept losing it, and unfortunately I think it may be out of print now. But the library finally located their copy, and I was finally in the right place when that happened, and it's worth the read if you come across a copy, or if you read Ducks and want to hunt down related material.
January 26, 2022
Love this book of poetry. Down to earth, witty and rough. There are lines in here that will stick with me forever.
December 27, 2022
I bought this after a recommendation from the cartoonist Kate Beaton, who shared Bird's experience of working in the oil sands of Canada in the strange micro-society dominated by male labourers and technicians, heavy machinery, and what science fiction writers would call terraforming: the transformation of an entire landscape through engineering. That both felt their experience was not wholly negative is an indication of their openness to understanding individuals with wholly different world-views and experiences. The poems here are at their strongest when describing the frustrations and occasional pleasures of living out of her comfort zone. The best poem is 'Safety reminder', which opens:
"Donnie's last sound was a boot
slip, sucked fifty feet down"
"Donnie's last sound was a boot
slip, sucked fifty feet down"
June 2, 2019
Lindsay Bird’s Boom Time is a unique and poetic examination of camp life in Fort McMurray, Alberta. Not only does she perform wonderful artistry in capturing the sorrowful atmosphere of “waddling through the mud / where a river should have been” in poems such as “Wood Buffalo”, Bird’s poetry paints the monotonous, seemingly lawless, violent and deeply gendered atmosphere in the work camps. The poems showcase Bird’s talent for discovering comedy and expressing joy in this environment. “Peter Pond Mall” takes an absurd look back at colonial Canadian history and points to where the explorer has led – a mall with discounts and a parking lot. Her poems are socially incisive, witty and capture both the pain and the humour of life in Northern Alberta work camps.
October 24, 2019
Bird's ability to pull such nuanced beauty out of the oil patch is remarkable. That she does so without sacrificing any of the rough and tumble of the subject matter leaves me marvelling. One of my favourite reads of 2019.
February 14, 2020
I picked it up at the library not knowing it was about Alberta/Fort McMurry, I hadn't even bothered to read the jacket! I groaned when I noticed, at home. But! I really enjoyed it. These poems are witty and well done. Lindsay Bird is a great writer who won me over with this collection.
December 22, 2022
A beautiful book and one I’ll think about for a long time. I read it as a sort-of companion to DUCKS and that made it a little more familiar, to orient myself in a place I’ve never been, but it stands easily on its own.
March 3, 2024
Just wanted to keep reading!
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews