ryan fitzpatrick, No Depression in Heaven

 

 

I’m going to fake a grip on that old gospel ship
Extract a scar across the sky
I’m gonna shit out brinks ‘till Heaven sinks
As I surge this world’s goodbye 

I’ve leveraged circling to total everything
All your debts with me you’ll square
I’m going to make a line that only knows to rise
‘Til we’re bailing out the air 

I’m going to crack my whip on that new condo strip
I’m renovicting all the sky
I’m gonna cry critique ‘til Heaven tweaks
Our mistakes until they’re crime 

It take financing’s taste to bite into the waste
Of spending’s time in prayer
And when that ship inflates, I’ll leave this world with haste
As our failure coats the air (“Hollow Square”)

The latest from Calgary-returned (by way of Edmonton, Toronto and Vancouver) poet and editor ryan fitzpatrick is No Depression in Heaven (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2025), a collection that follows and furthers a more overt Alberta-centred cultural thread, as established in their prior collection, Sunny Ways (Toronto ON: Invisible Publishing, 2023) [see my review of such here]: a collection of longer pieces that included writing prompted by and through Edward Burtynsky’s “massively scaled photographs” documenting and depicting the Alberta Tar Sands. As I’m sure you already well know, fitzpatrick is the author of a wealth of chapbooks going back some twenty-five years, as well as the full-length collections Fake Math (Montreal QC: Snare Books, 2007), Fortified Castles (Talonbooks, 2014) [see my review of such here] and Coast Mountain Foot (Talonbooks, 2021) [see my review of such here], as well as their non-fiction full-length debut, Ace Theory, “a book-length essay in fragments about asexuality,” forthcoming in 2026 with Book*hug Press.

In a recent article in the Calgary Guardian, fitzpatrick describes No Depression in Heaven as “a ‘poetry LP’ of improvisatory pieces that works through the history and forms of country music.” Set in two clusters of extended poems, “Side A” and “Side B,” the structure and content of fitzpatrick’s latest plays off the Alberta near-stereotypical ethos of “country and western music”—very different from, say, Dennis Cooley’s Country Music: New Poems (Kelowna BC: Kalamalka Press, 2004) [see my review of such here] or Zane Koss’ recent Country Music (Invisible Publishing, 2025) [see my review of such here], not to mention any other of the multitude of prairie poets over the years approaching bluegrass riffs on the lonesome cowboy or open, empty prairie (numerous of which, we now know, were deliberately-placed ideas across the North American prairie by a variety of racist government agents and agendas, to push First Nations peoples “out of the way” for wave upon wave of settler occupation). And yet, one can see linkages in fitzpatrick’s latest to the poems in Robert Kroetsch’s “Country and Western” section of his Completed Field Notes (Edmonton AB: University of Alberta Press, 2002), each poet offering their own section of lyrics composed in more overt country song-stanza shapes. “It won’t be long ‘til value streaks / Right through White City’s square,” fitzpatrick writes, “With fifty miles of elbow room / On either side to spare [.]”

Of his “TRACK LIST,” each side includes five “tracks” with titles such as “The Whole-Tone slur of the Lonesome Cowboy,” “Dopamine Lasso,” “Empty Craft,” “Waitin’ on a Word,” “These Are the Good Times” and “I Don’t Want to Get Adjusted to this World.” “O empty craft,” begins the extended “Waitin’ on a Word,” “I am because / my little / cowboy hat / knows me, / my slip note / overplinks / explained as / a saintly aged / truck-cab / nostalgia / for cut-out / white nothing / radio space / fade-shuttling / my cloud-gravelled / gut-feels, [.]” Held in their evolving foundations of articulating climate catastrophe and critiques of neoliberalism and capitalism through a language-centred lyric, fitzpatrick’s “poem-songs” target a very particular flavour of western nostalgia, one that could be seen as heavily pushed and favoured by the current provincial government in that particular province. As fitzpatrick writes in their “LINER NOTES” at the back of the collection: “What stuck with me as I listened were country’s conflicting obsessions with traditions and novelty, and with what is and isn’t ‘real’ country. Authenticity in the genre is tied to performance. A character or narrator in any given song needs to be rural poor, live the cowboy life, love America and freedom. It helps if you like to drink and own a pickup (or a tractor).” Interestingly enough, another factor in this nostalgia-element across the traditions of country music fall into population, as in Canada, at least, as it has been within my own lifetime (and fitzpatrick’s as well, they being nearly a decade younger than I), that the population of Canada has shifted from predominantly rural to predominantly urban. And yet, those elements of rural nostalgia run deep, well into the culture. And, after years of attempting other centres, it would seem, ryan fitzpatrick has returned to Alberta, perhaps to confront a history and lineage that couldn’t have been approached in such a way without having spent so much time away. As their end-notes begin:

Somewhere in the middle of 2021, I started listening to the country music of my youth. I grew up in Calgary with the radio on: CKRY Country 105 across two decades where the genre swung from the pop-baiting crossover music of Kenny Rogers to the neotraditionalism of George Strait. Dipping into playlist after playlist on Apple Music and YouTube, and whatever was playing on the radio in my sister Megan’s kitchen. I was amazed by how many songs I actually knew! I wanted to understand what attached me to this genre – a genre connected to a rural, southern US version of whiteness with its pickup trucks and honky-tonks, only some of which spoke to my urban, western Canadian experience. I wanted to know why this music felt so significant for me and what kinds of things it connected me to.