Nominated for The Pat Lowther Award
Prior to the success of Going Down Swinging, Billie Livingston was primarily known as a poet, with a seven-year pedigree of publishing her poems in literary journals around the world. After finishing and promoting her best-selling novel, she turned her focus back to poetry. The Chick at the Back of the Church brings together her best poems in a long-awaited first collection.
As a poet, Billie drives straight for the sharp edges--from the rough, self-assured and brash voice of a woman who poses nude at seventeen while considering the 40-year-old photographer as her guinea pig, to the confidante of relatives, and friends grappling with the tortured frustration of love, sexuality, adultery and death. These jagged realities also collide with the innocence of childhood--a toddler being offered LSD from the next-door neighbour, a Catholic schoolgirl being dropped into the frontlines of a fierce abortion protest and an elementary student just trying to practice her reading in the park but instead facing unwelcome "exposure." Livingston also includes a selection of poems written from the disparate voices of the same self-destructive family that eventually developed into the characters of the popular novel.
Reviews:
“Evokes early Michael Ondaatje”-- Danforth Review