Winter Wonderland?
Poetic Form in Service of the Modern Experience
by Kevin Girard

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A fairy tale that does unfold a red carpet, on which we are actors trying to live other people’s lives. It is meaning that we are losing as we try to just survive. Madness of the medicated, it’s all a violation of the question, “What is it to be human?” There is no order except what’s on the menu of the corporate fast-food line. In stark relief to the snowmen and cozy fires of its eponymous song, Winter Wonderland? is an unflinching look at the implications of modern Western philosophy and mores on our ability—or inability—to live an integrated and meaningful life. This poetic journey also takes in the author’s encounters with psychiatry and the systems that drive therapy, and ranges from the depths of despair to freedom from the confines of the mind, and even a consideration of romantic love.

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Kevin Girard’s life was shaped early on by reading Victor E Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning at the age of twelve. Greatly influenced by Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Marx, Camus, Sartre, Kafka, as well other lesser-known philosophers, he has spent a lifetime studying and putting philosophy and theology into practise in his own life. A graduate of the University of Alberta, he began writing to understand his own life path—which included thirty-six years in the mental health system. Winter Wonderland? is Girard’s second book of poetry; his first is Journey Songs (2024). He hopes his work will foster dialogue on important intellectual thoughts that have, and continue to have, an impact on society. He is a practising Catholic and lives in Edmonton, Alberta. It is all a tragic play where actors display their inability to say the words not the lines written by the Thomistic mind. Sorrow is now a play on words we no longer read or speak words meek we must declare that we cannot walk a Way. Away from the Sorrow we do stray . . .

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Kevin Girard