Duct-Taped Roses by Billeh Nickerson

In Duct-Taped Roses, Billeh Nickerson shares heartbreaks and offers odes and elegies in reflections on family, community, life, and loss.

As a bush pilot, Nickerson’s father would duct-tape his planes to keep them flying. The poignancy of his relationship with his father is celebrated here in the long poem “Skies.” Other poems reminisce about love and the complex resiliency of gay men.

Through his signature irreverence, honesty and wit, Nickerson explores what can be repaired, what must be celebrated, and what—inevitably—is lost to time.

Praise for Billeh Nickerson:

“Nickerson continues in line with his previous three collections, merging the absurd and crass with lyricism and sentimentality.” —Publishers Weekly

“Nickerson forms his exacting observations into poems that are fragile receptacles of wordplay.” —Quill and Quire, starred review

“Nickerson looks up at his community from the gutter, not down from the condo loft–and therefore, as Wilde taught us, he can also see the stars.” —R.M. Vaughan

Press Coverage:

Most Anticipated: Our 2021 Spring Poetry Preview —49th Shelf

55 Canadian Poetry Collections to Check Out in Spring 2021 —CBC Books

“[Nickerson’s] mind is a wonder, and lucky for us, he’s put so many wonderful thoughts from it onto these pages. These poems radiate tenderness, and I, in turn, can only feel a similar tenderness for the man who wrote them – a man who writes not only for ‘…boys who grew up misunderstood / for being as much sugar and spice/ as snakes and snails and puppy dog tails,’ but who writes for all of us, “stuck here on the ground” ensnared in the human condition.” —Heidi Greco, The Miramichi Reader