Description:
Night Lunch is a shapeshifting sonnet sequence set in the cold waters off the North Coast of Labrador. Reflecting Chaulk's own experience, the speaker - a young deckhand on a freight and passenger ferry servicing isolated communities - endures long irregular work hours, weather, icebergs, and loneliness, all the while navigating the taut intersections of race, labour, class, and masculinity. That Chaulk has Inuit family in and from Labrador makes this debut poetic journey a cultural coming-home for the young deckhand, as chronicled in supple, powerful verse.
Review Quotes:
"Night Lunch is a shimmering, sea-deep book about identity, family and territory, disguised as one of the most gorgeous books about work I have ever read. These poems take subtle, brilliant delight in language and rhythm, but it is their speaker's generous, steady voice that is the humming engine at the collection's heart, keeping time as he presses deeper into the complexities and contradictions of his Indigenous heritage, his work, and his past. Night Lunch is many things - autobiography, investigation, hymnal, crown - but more than anything it is an atlas, mapping brand new ancient territories of the mind, the land and the heart." - Emma Healey, author of Begin with the End in Mind and Stereoblind