I’ve had the good fortune to call many places across Canada home, but now I live with my family in southern Alberta on the edge of coulees and the Oldman River.

My poems have been published in The Fiddlehead, Prairie Fire, Riddle Fence, and The Malahat Review, among other journals and magazines. Earth-cool, and Dirty (Radiant Press) is my first collection of poetry.

When not writing, I teach at University of Lethbridge, and I can often be found hiking through the fields near my home while trying not to tread on well-camouflaged rattlesnakes.

If asked to give a general statement about poetry, I’d quote a few lines from Earth-cool, and Dirty, from a lyric simply titled “Poems”:

And yet more than decoration,
they are the artifacts of an old magic, an old cunning
in which words make, words happen.

When the mountainside hermit
executes the perfect brushstroke and the paint is
crow, flapping erratically from the page.

Creative work

Bachinger, Jacob Lee. Earth-cool, and Dirty. Radiant P, 2021.

---. “Autobiography of the Traverspine Gorilla.” Newfoundland Quarterly, vol. 113, no. 3, 2020/21, p. 26.

---. “The Green Man for Dinner.” The Malahat Review, no. 201, 2017, p. 78.

---. “Four poems.” Riddle Fence, no. 27, 2017, pp. 21-25.

---. “Two poems.” Prairie Fire Magazine, vol. 36, no. 3, 2015, pp. 50-51.

---. “For Heraclitus: ‘Nature Loves to Hide.’” Riddle Fence, no. 19, 2014, p. 44.

---. “Two poems.” FreeFall, vol. 24, no. 3, 2014: pp. 71, 75.

----. “Two poems.” Arc Poetry Magazine, no. 72, 2013, pp. 80-81.

---. “Backyard, St. John’s, NL.” The Lamp II, 2013, p. 41.

---. “Two poems.” Newfoundland Quarterly, vol. 105, no. 1, 2012, p. 33.

---. “Two poems.” Paragon V, 2012, pp. 88-89.

---. “Black Vultures.” Ottawa Arts Review, vol. 5, no. 2, 2011, p. 25.

---. “Three poems.” Paragon IV, 2011, pp. 34, 41, 86.

---. “Shadow.” Tower Poetry, vol. 58, no. 2, 2009, p. 25.

---. “Pileated Woodpecker.” The Society, 2005, p. 12.

---. “Morning.” The Fiddlehead, no. 214, 2002, p. 68.

Peer-reviewed articles and essays

Bachinger, Jacob. “Gary Snyder’s ‘The Wild Mushroom.’” The Explicator, vol. 71, no. 1, 2013, pp. 7-10.

---. “‘Tricky Flin’: A Text/Game in Northern Manitoba.” The Northern Review, no. 31, 2009, pp. 190-200.

Non peer-reviewed articles and essays

Bachinger, Jacob. “‘In fellowship of death’: Animals and Nonhuman Nature in Irving Layton’s Ecopoetics.” The Goose, vol. 13, no. 2, 2015, pp. 1-13.

---. “The Arctic and ‘Other Spaces’ in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.” at the EDGE 1, 2010, pp. 158-74.

---. “An Extraordinary Voyage into the Garrison Mentality: James De Mille’s A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder.” The Quint: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly from the North, vol. 3, no. 1, 2010, pp. 70-87.

Reviews and Interviews

Bachinger, Jacob. “The little things that shake us awake”: Q&A with Monica Kidd.
Miramichi Reader, 2020

---. “In Conversation: Zach Wells: ‘In Between Is Where I Find Myself Most of the Time.”
Humber Literary Review, 2014,

---. “All In Together: Robin McGrath on the Rhymes, Ditties and Jingles of Newfoundland and Labrador.”
Newfoundland Quarterly, vol. 103, no. 4, 2011, pp 34-37.

---. Review of The Pissing Women of Lafontaine by Roger Bell.
The Prairie Journal of Canadian Literature, no. 50, 2009, pp. 56-57.

---. “My Woodpecker Has a Headache.” Review of For Love of the City by Alan Reed and My Chimera by Michael Penny.
Paperplates magazine, vol. 7, no. 2, 2009, pp. 52-54.

Reviews:

By Jonathan Ball (Winnipeg Free Press):

“Quick turns that catch the reader off guard nestle against quieter, subtler moments in this impressive debut.”

By Paisley Conrad (Canadian Literature):

“The collection is a paean to remainders, a song to what grows in the seams of memory and in the crannies of one’s home. What lingers beyond the horizon of each poem is the idea of an absent or ignored cause, one that the speaker can only glimpse out of the corner of their eye.”

Interview:

With James M. Fisher (The Miramachi Reader):

“...my way of looking at the natural world: the earth is cool, dispassionate, even cruel, and yet also dirty, passionate, disorderly.”