Household Hints for the End of Time

Winner of the 2001 Anne Szumigalski Award for Poetry * Shortlisted for the 2001 Regina Book Award (Saskatchewan Book Awards) * Shortlisted for the 2002 Gerald Lampert Award * Longlisted for the 2002 ReLit Awards.

from "Max's Bath"

What happens next? Well I hold you
while Peg gets a diaper, you yell
when she heads down the hall.
And then you pee on me, my
shirt, a consecration
no one else has received. I hold you close,
like the cold spring rain
peering in at us, tapping the
blue windowpane with its
tiny dark and pudgy hands.

A wide-ranging reckless intelligence, verbal audacity and irrepressible humour ? all these combine with a large-hearted embrace of existence in Ken Howe?s poems. Whether they are observing, with fine ironic wit, the vagaries of domestic life, elegizing lost ones, or raised in celebration of musical compositions, they remind us of the need to address the world with all our faculties alert, including a language alive with its native energy and luminosity.

Ken Howe was born in Edmonton, grew up in Beaverlodge, Alberta, and now lives in Regina with his friendly pit bull Zuki. He has played principal horn with the Regina Symphony for eight years. Ken is a member of the Council of Canadians, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, and R. Murray Schaeffer's Wolf Project. The manuscript for Household Hints for the End of Time was awarded a John V. Hicks Manuscript Award in 2000. Ken also received the 2000 City of Regina Writing Award. In March 2001 he won a Canada Council grant to write more poems.