Boy

Victor Enns is a poet who engages and beguiles by giving us the complexities of childhood on the prairies. Boy is richly evocative of time and place: small town Manitoba in the 60's. Enns gives the reader archetypal and singular experiences which encompass the fluster and cruelty of childhood encounters, the sometimes bitter nature of faith, and the fever of new temptations and understandings. In part an insightful family story, Boy reveals the half-secret places where a child makes room for his true life, a life he sees walking toward him from a great distance. Here is poetry both measured and exhilarating, both lyrical and touched by Enns's own brand of dark wit. Encountering the breathtaking and heartbreaking poems of child abuse toward the end of the collection, we gain a new appreciation for the poet and his fearless poems.

Victor Enns

Victor Enns was born in Winnipeg in 1955. Raised in a small border town, often mentioned in weather reports, Gretna, Manitoba, he moved back to the big city with his parents in 1968. His hometown reclaimed him for his studies at the Mennonite Collegiate Institute where he graduated with its largest class in 1972; his mother's Studebaker stuck in low gear on the way to the party after graduation.

His first collection, Jimmy Bang Poems (Turnstone, 1979), the result of his participation in an advanced creative writing workshop led by Robert Kroetsch, was published after his graduation from the University of Manitoba. Boy is the prequel of sorts to Correct in this Culture (5th House Press, 1985) and Lucky Man (Hagios Press, 2005) which was nominated for the 2005 NcNally Robinson Manitoba Book of the Year Award. Enns's most recent book is Boy, Hagios Press, 2012.

Website » www.victorenns.ca