“I love the details, and the places your mind goes, these randomly disconnected thoughts. So many wonderful territories in this book.”
- Sheryl McKay, CBC’s North by Northwest
"Jeff Pew’s poems are full of play, curiosity, wisdom, and pain. He’s a generous poet whose work ranges from the beautifully banal to the bizarrely surreal. You should read him, and read him to your friends on the phone."
- Stuart Ross, author of A Sparrow Came Down Resplendent
“The small and immediate is juxtaposed with the big and global. In Jeff Pew’s eulogy for youth, the world is a closely considered, well-worn, best-loved thing; reading One Foot In, you’ll have your own conversation with death and with the celebration that is life.”
- Jane Eaton Hamilton, author of Weekend. CBC Literary Prize
yu will fall in love with ths book full uv delishus mooving sew reel n satisying n qwestyuning art life n philosophik concerns that ar immediate n sew accessibul ths wundrful vois is saying speeking engayging pomes that bring yu in qwestyuning ideas humour tragedeez bleek n abundant changing alwayze jeff pew sz th narrativ uv life is change colours moovments words th lifting weight uv speech brave n tendr ths book is a wundrful gift 2 us generous n heeling th blessings uv great langwage n ideas heer jeff pew shows us th frailtee uv our systems we ar sumtimes free uv 2 love
- bill bissett, George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award; BC Book Prizes Dorothy Livesay Prize
“These generous and deeply felt poems invite us to lean into the mysteries of love, life and death--always "one foot in"--reminding us that we never step in the same river twice. The collection's wild and ecstatic metaphors burn their star maps, and spark their quantum leaps, beneath the familiar surfaces of dive bars, a couple's kitchen, a hospital bed...to pickled brains and tsunami waves, and the dogged, even heartless, evolution of love, these poems take us for a spin in the babysitter's mustang, and leave us curb-side, our minds blown and hearts broken.”
- Stephanie Warner, author of A Violent Streak
“In this book of poems, Jeff Pew explores life’s mysteries—loss, celebration, mindfulness—through the intimate minutiae of the day-to-day. A lover’s note left in the kitchen, straws nervously lined up in a dive bar: the undercurrents of small but charged moments like these are explored through language that is trim and muscular.
Pew lifts the cloak off many of death’s inconspicuous forms: a tangled logjam, a plucked nose hair, the overpriced plumber. Throughout this careful observation, a sweet obituary to youth rivers its way through the book, a nostalgia for the mischievous and innocent antics of childhood, before the inevitable truths adulthood brings, such as the strange pain and tender longing that resides even in the most celebratory love.”
- Kootenay Mountain Culture, Reviewed by Britt Bates