THE NARROW ROAD TO THE FAR WEST First up, it’s a new collection of poems from the city’s poet laureate, Alan Hill. The Narrow Road to the Far West: Travelling New Westminster By Postcard, recently released by Silver Bow Publishing, is described by the author as his “very personal tribute to some of the places that have meant most to me in my time living in New Westminster.” Each poem is its own literary “postcard” to a uniquely Royal City location – some well-known, like the petting farm at Queen’s Park, the Tin Soldier and River Market, and others of a less-travelled variety, such as the dollar store at Royal City Mall and the Great Clips on McBride Boulevard. The poems include both elegant imagery and a sense of the humour and absurdity of day-to-day life. Like this moment from Centre Span, Pattullo Bridge … “It is the bruised skin of something extinct that has been stretched, pulled tight across the high-rise limbs of the city.” Or this, from Old Crow Café, Front Street … “I left with a quadruple Americano, a tattoo of a raven on my thigh the feeling, it may not be too late, to learn the banjo, run away, join the circus.”