Night Lunch by Mike Chaulk

"Mike Chaulk’s debut collection infuses lyrics with workmanship, makes poetics of the utilitarian, the grit, and, as he frequently denotes it, the haunted." – Joan Sullivan, for The Telegram

"Having found his voice, readers should eagerly anticipate whatever Chaulk does next." – James K. Moran in Arc Poetry

Night Lunch is a shapeshifting sonnet sequence set in the cold waters off the North Coast of Labrador. Reflecting Chaulk’s own experience, the speaker—a young deckhand on a freight and passenger ferry servicing isolated communities—endures long irregular work hours, weather, icebergs, and loneliness, all the while navigating the taut intersections of race, labour, class, and masculinity. That Chaulk has Inuit family in and from Labrador makes this debut poetic journey a cultural coming-home for the young deckhand, as chronicled in supple, powerful verse.

Mike Chaulk lives in Guelph, Ontario. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Best Canadian Poetry 2018, The Malahat Review, Arc Poetry Magazine, The Puritan, PRISM: international, and filling Station, among other places. In 2015, Chaulk co-founded &, collective, an experimental poetry collective in Guelph, with whom he published two group chapbooks (&, 1: works by &, collective, self-published, and &, 2: this happened to one of us, Publication Studio Guelph). He has worked as a seaman in Labrador, Sweden, and Wales, and previously lived in Montreal for five years where he punched time as the Associate Poetry Editor of The Incongruous Quarterly as well as the Editor-in-Chief of The Void Magazine at Concordia University. He now spends a good deal of time walking his dog in the woods.