The SubWay by Philip Quinn

 1st Place winner of the Toronto Arts Council 2009 Get Lit competition.

Ensconced in the hard physicality of the Toronto subway system and its mechanisms and those elements of humanity that occasionally peer out from behind its moving windows, The SubWay illustrates the history of the TTC and the impact it has had on those riding it. Blending both lyric poetry and found poetry, The SubWay examines an underground that in many ways performs as the central nervous system to the city of Toronto. Readers enter Quinn’s The SubWay, and between stops and starts, effectively see their own subterranean selves.

Reviews

“Sometimes backed with morgue-like historical fodder, other times sparse and linguistically playful, Quinn’s book is a ‘jackhammer to the simple concrete things,’ perhaps fitting that a line from his own book best describes the work.” — Broken Pencil

“Quinn has written this painting in a collage of images, mixing the metaphoric with the real, both embedded in the bedrock of the Toronto subway. Reality as hard as the rails on which it rides. Metaphoric as Savoy Brown’s Hellbound Train. Train as triune brain each rail a synapse between the ganglia of stations. Bicamerality divided.” — Prairie Fire

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Philip Quinn lives in Toronto. His poetry has appeared in Inkstone, Rampike, sub-Terrain, Cabaret Vert, Snow Monkey and Anemone Sidecar. His short fiction has appeared in Quarry, blood + aphorisms, Front & Centre, Canadian Fiction magazine, Kiss Machine, Broken Pencil and Lichen journal. In 2000, a collection of short fiction entitled Dis Location, Stories After the Flood was published by Gutter Press. The Double, a novel, was published by Gutter in 2003. Quinns journalism has appeared in The Ottawa Citizen, National Post and the Toronto Star. The SubWay is his first collection of poetry.