What Your Hands Have Done: Poems

Praise for What Your Hands Have Done
“[Bailey] often relies on a lean vernacular to portray that grueling way of life and those he shares it with.”
- Barbara Carey, Toronto Star
“Chris Bailey canvases easily—adroitly—that difficult, East Coast world of hard-scrabble, hard-luck ports and hard-living, hard-drinking fishers, the epicureans of cynicism and the aesthetes of brutalism. […] Think E.J. Pratt meets Charles Bukowski.”
- George Elliott Clarke, former Parliamentary Poet Laureate
“Bailey’s voice here is all authentic”
“Bailey’s work explores questions of identity: family and roots—mostly working class—character portraits and poems of romance. There’s much to admire in these short, clean stanzas and the landscape that shines through behind them—its pine trees and cold rain, its lobster and herring gear, its dark sky and restless ocean.”
- Joseph Millar, 2012 Guggenheim Fellow
“This is no quaint voice from the Land Of Anne. Suffused with our era’s geist and angst, which have penetrated to the rural periphery, Bailey is a sharp-eyed, clarion-voiced witness in his crow’s nest.”
- Richard Lemm, 2020 PEI Book Award-Winner
“While the poems in this collection are rooted in East Coast life, their themes reveal themselves in a darker universality that concerns common patterns of masculine existence.”
- A.W. French, The Hamilton Review of Books
Watch Your Head: Writers and Artists Respond to the Climate Crisis

We are in a climate emergency. The polar bears are starving, Australia is burning. Climate anxiety – like sea levels – is rising to unprecedented levels. In response to this, poet and editor Kathryn Mockler created a website where writers and artists could post creative works that respond to this crisis. Watch Your Head curates the best poems, stories, essays, and images related to our environmental crisis. The work is ranty, mourning, desperate, in-your-face, hopeful, healing, transformative, and radical. It calls out hypocrisy and injustice to inspire you to do whatever you can – volunteer for an organization, support land and water defenders, call out the media – and it’ll make you feel less alone in your worry.
Best Canadian Stories: 2021

“The best short stories,” writes editor Diane Schoemperlen, “are disruptive in all the best ways, diverse in all senses of the word, always looking back and leading forward at the same time … they must be written in the world, in the midst of a pandemic, in the midst of more horrifying news every day.” Submitted and published by Canadian writers in 2020, Schoemperlen’s selections for Best Canadian Stories 2021 feature work by established practitioners of the form alongside exciting newcomers, and stories published by leading magazines and journals as well as those appearing in print for the first time—all of which, as Schoemperlen writes, “bring us news of the world and the shape of things to come.