Product Description

Implicating extremes from Coriolanus to Karen Carpenter, David McGimpsey’s Sitcom is both serious poetry and a work of comedy.

Mischievous, generous and side-splittingly funny, this collection of wry soliloquies and sonnets begins with a milestone birthday and finds itself – through antic turns and lyric flips to demi-mondes as varied as the offices of university regents and the basic plot arc of Hawaii Five-O – to a sincere contemplation of mortality and the fashion sense of Mary Tyler Moore. Unembarrassed by its literary allusions or its hi-lo hybridity, Sitcom’s strategic and encompassing voice is prepared for each comedic disaster and is, somehow, always ready for next week’s episode.

‘McGimpsey displays erudition, clever insights and a knack for the wickedly funny wisecrack.’ – The Washington Post

‘[McGimpsey] finds the humanity hiding in the hilarity. This guy is as funny as David Sedaris, and more inventive.’ – The Ottawa Citizen

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3289 in Books
• Published on: 2007-09-01
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: .38" h x 5.22" w x 7.99" l, .40 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 112 pages

Review

'Sitcom is the sad, beautiful music of popular culture and related topics, including our own mortality and essential aloneness in the world ... While other, more minor poets might compose pentameters about episodes of Friends for their friends to chuckle at, McGimpsey's sonnet-like '14 Episodes' is about Joey, Matt LeBlanc's after-the-fact Friends spinoff. That's how you know he's the real deal (McGimpsey, not LeBlanc).' – The Mirror

'It's poetry that should not work, but does, brilliantly. McGimpsey's voice is so original and subversive that he is practically re-casting the poetry mold, pushing the boundaries of literary acceptability, and doing so without a hint of pretentiousness.' – Montreal Gazette

Eye Weekly, September 27, 2007
In Sitcom, his fourth collection of poems, McGimpsey draws on the metaphoric powers of sitcom and television stars to construct something, and it is a fascinating something, as tragic as it funny ... Thanks to McGimpsey’s infomercial-strong pitch, he’s proven that one may experience sublimity by repeating the mantra ‘Aloha, Garret, Five-O’ as much, if not better, than one can by studying W.H. Auden.'

Winnipeg Free Press, November 25, 2007
A lot of Canadian poets are rediscovering traditional forms these days, but few of them are having as much fun as Montreal writer David McGimpsey ... If this book’s not a Griffin prize finalist, then future juries will have to be rigged to include more TV-watching poets.