Giscombe

Giscombe is a poet first and foremost. I don't care for much poetry, and not his in particular; just poerty at all. Where I find allegory and metaphor very descriptive, I find poetry to be code. I find no pleasure in reading or writing in code. So C.S. Giscombe is not one I'd have encountered had he not branched out into prose. I bought this book for $3 because I liked a single passage and afterward read it and went onto enjoy it as a whole.

Into and Out of dislocation is a book about a hundred things: America, Canada, blackness, genealogy, teaching, writing, history, travel, research, sex, good food, bad food, drinking bourbon, mass transit, bicycling... It's disjointed like Saroyan. But skillfully tied together by a tight first-person narrative. The single quote follows. The italics are his, the bold is mine.

"I'm here to reclaim him, I wrote in my journal that winter in Fort George. This is the dry hump of kinship, my arrival at the public dock at Germansen Landing or Fort George or the mouth of Quesnelle to reclaim his ass. "