Robert Priest is a heck of a guy. Popular spoken-word poet, author of 23 books and counting, he’s also co-writer of a hit song, and can be seen on his Instagram playing guitar apparently nude in a field of horses. This is a man who is living his best life.
That intensity of living comes through in the poems of his newest collection, Accidents After Happening. I’m less familiar with his body of work than I maybe ought to be, so I am experiencing it fairly fresh, and it’s a juicy package indeed. He’s got to be getting on in years, but that just means more escapades to reflect upon. Plenty of these are erotic in nature, often positing sexuality as a driver of poetry and vice versa. “Maybe it was oral sex that first opened the doors of poetry,” he suggests, “Because of sex we made war, we made peace / The rosy engines, the regal pistons of copulation / gave us moveable type and the printing press”.
However, it hasn’t all been fun and games. In “Black Brogues” he’s remembering a pair of overly slippery black plastic shoes “bought very cheap but a perfect fit / Unsafe because / the soles are smooth / gripless” that he’d purchased at a point when he was broke and had just gotten out of the psych ward, being very cautiously squired about by friends who “came / on a daily basis / to walk me / outside / hyperaware / of super smooth surfaces / patches of ice”.
The collection is structured in one piece, without section dividers, but there are thematic movements through the work. Priest includes several poems of elegy for friends who’ve passed, as well as a set of poems calling for a pacifist approach to political conflicts. At times these have the feel of song lyrics, and may lose some of their effectiveness on the page. At his best he’s hilarious and touching, as when he says, “I’m not sure I loved you with the face you had / before the world began / I can only say that I have heard you snoring / and I loved you then”. At other times he’s plain hilarious. Why dance like no one is looking, as the old saw would have it, when you can “Make love like the dog’s not watching”? Honestly, that line alone is worth the book’s cover price, although I guess I’ve just given it away for free.
Poems about poetry, or ars poetica, form a strong thread through the collection. “What we all want from this poem / is deniability” he asserts in a poem concerned with silences and evasions. Elsewhere he articulates some of the internal pressures that we can place upon ourselves as poets, for “Poetry expects me to say something / to take a stand, a position / to hold up my hand with all its flab / melted away to elegant essence // It expects me to veer always to the difficult”. Still, to be a poet is to live in a universe of abundance. “I took a word,” he begins, “from a word / and the word / was still full of words / I took another / and another / and just when I thought / I might have too many / I realized every word I’d taken / was full of other words // I could describe the universe / twice / I could beg forever and never repeat myself”. Fitting thoughts from a prolific writer, performer, and artist of the expansive life.
About the Author
People’s poet Robert Priest has achieved bestseller status as both a songwriter and a poet. He lives in Toronto, ON.
About the Reviewer
Dawn Macdonald lives in Whitehorse, Yukon, where she grew up without electricity or running water. She won the 2025 Canadian First Book Prize for her poetry collection Northerny. She posts weekly at Reviews of Books I Got for Free or Cheap (on Substack), as well as reviewing for journals and for The Seaboard Review of Books.
Book Details
Published: ECW Press, September 2025
ISBN: 9781770418530
Dimensions: 5.5 x 8.5 in.
Pages: 136
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