{"product_id":"trouble-sleeping-9781894078115","title":"Trouble Sleeping","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003e\"If only my cousin had kept off me, kept out of me his brown fly-strop glue, his shot dog-eye cream. Afterwards, he would comb my hair to a wet Elvis point between my eyes and warn me what his wolves would do to me, and where I'd be sent, if I ever told.\"\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThis experience is at the core of Phil Hall's \u003cem\u003eTrouble Sleeping\u003c\/em\u003e. It is the source of bad dreams and also, paradoxically, the source of his crisp, luminous text. \u003cem\u003eTrouble Sleeping\u003c\/em\u003e makes visible the poetry of hopeful despair by remembering a poor working class family of Irish descent, living outside the margins of respectability at the edge of the Laurentian Shield in mid-Northern Ontario in the 1950s. This raw world is seen by a child who is a misfit in it (especially among its brutal, drunken males). That child will eventually come to speak for the plight of unregarded misfits in society at large. \"Orthodontics is a class issue\" to the writer looking back on a time when it never occurred to his parents that crooked teeth might be fixed—not that they could have afforded it. In \u003cem\u003eTrouble Sleeping\u003c\/em\u003e, working a variation on the Japanese form of haibun, Hall alternates prose passages with poems that reflect nightmarishly on the interwoven narratives.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Phil Hall","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":48278410756347,"sku":"9781894078115","price":14.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0779\/3917\/9771\/files\/CoreSourceHub_b722cc89-1df1-4918-b2e0-b1dc5527bab7.jpg?v=1775853951","url":"https:\/\/indiepubs.com\/products\/trouble-sleeping-9781894078115","provider":"IndiePubs","version":"1.0","type":"link"}