For Love of the City

By Alan Reed
Edited by John Buschek
Interior design by John Buschek
Cover photo & design by Alan Reed

110 pages
Buschek Books, 2006 (out of print)
worldcat

A sequence of poems drawn from observations of everyday life in an unnamed city. The book was written in Edmonton, but has its origins in the time I lived in Toronto and the ways I tried, and largely failed, to make sense of that very different place.

The poems started as posters that I put up on streetposts in Edmonton, with the idea that reading them would reproduce the rhythm of walking a city’s streets. It was a way to fold the repesentation of a city back into the material experience of being in that city, a way of mirroring it from within itself.

This version of the project was staged in collaboration with Latitude 53 in 2005 under the title City Poems. I then reworked the poems as a sequence built around a narrative that echoed my experience living in Toronto and then returning to Edmonton after. This version of the project was published as For Love of the City.

everywhere
there’s this history

written
in a language
of broken bottles
muddy footprints

every kind
of discarded thing

I can see it
feel it

I just don’t know how
to read it