Nick Thran is the author of three collections of poems. His most recent collection, Mayor Snow, is forthcoming this fall with Nightwood Editions. His previous collection, Earworm, won the 2012 Trillium Book Award for Poetry. His first collection, Every Inadequate Name, was a finalist for the 2007 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. Born in Prince George, British Columbia, Thran has lived and worked in a variety of cities across Canada, as well as in the United States and Spain. He is the 2015-16 Writer-in-Residence at the Calgary Distinguished Writers’ Program with the University of Calgary.

Mayor Snow

Mayor Snow is about both the abdication and acceptance of responsibilities and inheritance: be they civic, personal, poetic. It begins with speaker-less evocations of corrupt and oppressive political atmospheres and ends with first-person narrative tales of domestic life in Al Purdy’s refurbished A-frame. All of these poems work in a shadow, be they forebears, tabloids, cultural markers or government watchdogs.