Michael V. Smith is a writer, comedian, filmmaker, performance artist, and occasional clown. He is the author of several books including What You Can’t Have, which was shortlisted for the ReLit Award, and My Body Is Yours, which was a Lambda Literary Award finalist. He is also the winner of the inaugural Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBT Emerging Writers and was nominated for the Journey Prize. Smith currently teaches creative writing at the University of British Columbia’s Okanagan campus in Kelowna. Bad Ideas is his latest collection of poetry. Website: michaelvsmith.com. Twitter: @MichaelVeeSmith.

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Reviews of Bad Ideas:

• “Bad Ideas is divided into four categories: prayers, dreams of friends and family, queer and little things. And in many ways, it is a “book of anxieties … an address to better understand them” – In the Province
• “Michael V. Smith’s new poetry collection, Bad Ideas, is comprised of meditations on mourning, longing, sexuality, and gender. Throughout the book are poems about the passing of Smith’s father, poems that question masculinity, and poems that strive for joy” – In Quill and Quire

Interviews:

• “Some of these poems jumped for me in surprising ways, like ‘Prayer for Humility’, where my father’s catheter appears, and an ekphrastic poem about a John Kissick painting that somehow dredged up a memory about my parents fighting when I was young” – In PRISM Magazine 
• “Every poem is true to the writer and only true if it’s true for the reader too. Poems act like test cases, to determine what we both agree to be true” – In Verbicide Magazine