REVIEWS

• Of Grace and Cruelty: A Review of Burn Diary by Joshua Chris Bouchard | The Ex-Puritian | Aishwarya Singh

• Burn Diary by Joshua Chris Bouchard (a Buckrider Book, 2023) | Marrow Reviews | Catherine Owen

ADVANCE PRAISE

"A survey of the unrelenting violence of life and love. A boy becomes a man becomes a poet. The poems in Bouchard’s debut are filthy, fearless, and pulsatingly alive. His hands nearly visible on the page, he cradles beauty and trauma at once and, like a strongman with a phonebook, tears them down the centre. As in 'When I Walk Into an Air-Conditioned Dollarama,' Bouchard grabs the reader by the shoulders and screams, 'Oh look at this thing as I pass away I love it.' Burn Diary is a book bound with sinew, pine sap, and scar tissue.” 

– Fawn Parker, author of Soft Inheritance

"Bouchard presents our world as you have never seen it—have only dared to feel it from the unfinished basement of your 3AM mind. These poems sneak out the back door of your memory to '[smoke] pot / from a cracked Coke can behind a church', then 'bathe [you] in the golden hem of the sun'. They break and burn and torment and then, when you least expect it, they settle your wounded heart. These are poems which will teach you the terror of tenderness ripping through you like a train, but only if you are brave enough to let them in.” 

– Jessica Bebenek, author of No One Knows Us There