For Display Purposes Only

“Whip-pan-smart, fleet and protean, David Seymour’s poems seem to contain the speed of the age. I love their ranginess and ambition, the way they rove through a here-and-now teeming with there-and-then, their speakers’ flights and turnings through the blizzard. This is a different world, and we live in it.” —Paul Farley

“For Display Purposes Only is fighting trim, and poem after poem is a knockout blow.” — National Post

“We are met at the front door of this book by an energized curiosity and a humane amusement. Worlds only notionally, minimally there become fully dimensioned, clearly edged under Seymour’s attention. David Seymour is a magician.”—Tim Lilburn

These poems pause for the spectacle—cloning technologies, super-slo-mo photography, narcotic cab rides—to describe a system of tripwires, pitfalls, and decoys that the notion of daily viewership entails. These poems are paeans to our facility for duplicity and self-deception, in which the act of living is like a movie we’re not in.

David Seymour‘s first collection, Inter Alia, was nominated for the Gerald Lampert Award. He works in the film industry.