Coast Mountain Foot

by Ryan Fitzpatrick

Written over the span of a decade and a half, Coast Mountain Foot keens its ear to the energies that connect cities, refracting the gesture of George Bowering’s 1968 classic Rocky Mountain Foot. Occasioned by fitzpatrick’s own move from Calgary to Vancouver in 2011, the book writes through the messy perspectives of the two cities as they bleed into one another – the energy in one city’s streets suddenly appearing in the other – and engages with the urban and its intimacies through careful listening. The book’s interlaced serial poetics is anchored by a series of lyric poems written in moments of transit – walking the streets, riding the bus, pausing in coffee shop windows. In these moments of reflection, fitzpatrick pinpoints his relationship to urban transformation. Written amid booms and busts, high and low tides, Coast Mountain Foot dwells on the gold rush and its aftermaths to When the good times are all gone and it’s time for moving on, what does it mean to move forward while snared by the past?

160 pages, Paperback

Published August 31, 2021

Reviews

[Lea · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed the conversational voice of the tower shaped poems. The twisted nature of society’s structure is spotlit in thought-provoking ways. Vancouver and Calgary are often referenced. I think my favourite stanza of the collection comes from the poem Wet City, Dry City, and it reads:

For fuck’s sake,
stop referencing
so much theory.

To me it just sums up what of this book is getting at. It’s a laugh and cry situation. I sense a brick wall being pushed at over and over with these poems. It persists.

Other favourite poems in this collection are The City Dweller in Perpetual Movement; Urbanization As Method; and Under The Condominium Signs.