Hallucinatory when not nightmarish, richly textured and cheerfully nti-conventional, this collection of three shorter works brings back the late sixties in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. So did New Star Books take a risk extracting these pieces from the mothballs to give them a fresh exposure? Well, no. Mostly it's energizing to be startled by this bygone craziness.

Who remembers the Woodwards Food Floor? Or who cares to remember? Backup to Babylon is street-smart mythology that frequently champions the poor or the marginalized. Though concrete poetry does not give the same amount of buzz as it once did, the over-the-top rawness (influenced by the Kootenay School of Writing way back when?) is still strikingly original.

Sometimes completely unintelligible-probably purposefully so- Maxine Gadd's poems can also be evocative as in a lovely coastal poem entitled "spring moves fast now."; In another piece about coldness, this one entitled "I will sell my soul? for warm hands,"; the poet evokes hardships that today's neo-hippies could not imagine.
This writing is the opposite of carefully worked finesse. Gadd is anarchic, a poet who likes to "praise bad things."; She writes: "so i / must go for it again / for an answer/ compatible / with my humanity / before daybreak / in the black winter night"; It's good to have her voice recovered and collected. 1-55420-024-5

[BCBW 2006]