SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2006 GOVERNOR GENERAL'S AWARD"Elizabeth Bachinsky is one of those rare poets capable of negotiating poetic forms with rigour and testing their limits, while never losing sight of the strange, dark music of what it means to be human. We should expect great things from her."
--The Globe and MailHome of Sudden Service is a sad and scary book of punk rock villanelles and sonnets about delinquency.
Set in Anyvalley, North America,
Home of Sudden Service centres around the experiences of young people growing up in the suburbs. The contrast of elegant poetic forms with the colloquial, often harsh language of suburban teens makes for a compelling and engaging achievement.
Bachinsky creates a gothic landscape that will be familiar to anyone who's visited the suburbs. Here, young Brownies dance, learn to sew and get badges in a series of eerie rituals, and smalltown girls settle down early. Murder, lust, teen pregnancy and a young man's disappearance are all discussed with a matter-of-fact, dispassionate voice.
But this world is not without humour and hope.
Home of Sudden Service concludes with "Drive," a series of fifteen sonnets about the poet's trip across Canada with her sister -- and out of the setting of their youth.
An accomplished poet who thinks and feels in the forms she employs. --"University of Toronto Quarterly"
[
Home of Sudden Service] packs a wallop of teenage angst, boredom and risky sexiness... an unusual and highly accomplished use of form by a young poet on the subject of loose girls and the freeway culture of malls, necking, cruelty and tragedy. Elizabeth Bachinsky demonstrates more skill in a couple of sonnets and villanelles than poets twice her age do in a couple of books... Most striking in this explicit collection is the contrast between the accomplished technique and the harsh realities of life voiced in colloquial language.
--Hannah Main-Van der Kamp, BC Bookworld 
