Wait Until Late Afternoon
OR distilled, decanted and debauched

by David Bateman and Hiromi Goto

David Bateman and Hiromi Goto’s collaborative poem, Wait Until Late Afternoon, is a nostalgic/anti-nostalgic creative autobiographical conversation. Tracing their relationship to their fathers, their lives, and to each other through the transfiguring effects of alcohol, the narrative travels from glamorous nightclubs and the Jade Market in Taipei to Peterborough, Ontario and Nanton, Alberta. Through memory, mourning, geographies and sexualities, this poetic narrative is at once a memento mori and meditations upon wabi sabi.

Reviews

Bateman and Goto share these pages with a tipsy, razor-edged humility. Intriguing, painful, funny and moving, these poems speak to each other in a conversation that seduced me like a row of glittering, multi-coloured cocktails. You can’t just have one… I downed the whole book in one sitting. — Evalyn Parry

Fix yourself a big Manhattan (rye, not bourbon), then sit in your favourite chair as far as possible from the dirty dishes, and read your way through this lyric conversation. Hear it aloud inside your barely sober head. These are words you can give yourself to with confidence, they are that precise and that evocative. — George Bowering