Slick Reckoning

For more than half his life, Ken Belford lived back of beyond” in the Skeena mountains, in Gitxsan territory. He lived, all that time, around the corner” from the colonizer. He is an unusual man, not your usual white guy, and his reputation has to do with land, and how people live on it.The self-educated lan(d)guage” poet has said that living for decades in the back country” has afforded him a unique relationship to language that rejects the colonial impulse to write about nature, but speaks from the regions of the other.The conventional standards of narrative and lyric poetry give me nothing. The intention of the sequences I write is to assemble words that can be messaged to the habituated souls of the city from the land-aware that live outside city limits.”Currently living in Prince George, British Columbia, with his activist wife, Si, Belford continues to write outside the boundaries of the conventional forms of the various schools of poetry.His seven previous books of poetry are Fireweed, The Post Electric Caveman, Pathways into the Mountains, lan(d)guage, when snakes awaken, ecologue, Decompositions, and Internodes.