Coast Mountain Foot (Paperback)

Written over the span of a decade and a half, Coast Mountain Foot keens its ear to the energies that connect cities, refracting the gesture of George Bowering’s 1968 classic Rocky Mountain Foot. Occasioned by fitzpatrick’s own move from Calgary to Vancouver in 2011, the book writes through the messy perspectives of the two cities as they bleed into one another – the energy in one city’s streets suddenly appearing in the other – and engages with the urban and its intimacies through careful listening. The book’s interlaced serial poetics is anchored by a series of lyric poems written in moments of transit – walking the streets, riding the bus, pausing in coffee shop windows. In these moments of reflection, fitzpatrick pinpoints his relationship to urban transformation. Written amid booms and busts, high and low tides, Coast Mountain Foot dwells on the gold rush and its aftermaths to ask: When the good times are all gone and it’s time for moving on, what does it mean to move forward while snared by the past?

ryan fitzpatrick s the author of five books of poetry, including the recent No Depression in Heaven (Talonbooks, 2025) and Sunny Ways (Invisible, 2023). Their creative nonfiction book Ace Theory, an essay-in-fragments about asexuality, will be published by Book*Hug in 2026. They are a former editor at filling Station magazine and helped organize the Flywheel reading series. They were the 2024–2025 Writer-in-Residence at the University of Alberta. You can find them at ryanfitzpatrick.ca. They live in Calgary.