A Bad Year for Journalists

By turns sympathetic, critical, darkly funny and painstakingly lyrical, the poems trace journalistic travels in the Middle East - "places at their best dismantled" - and overlay the national and geographical settings with characters and anecdotes so vivid the reader feels as if she might be at home in these places after all… In an increasingly hyperbolic idiom where everything is so conveniently unspeakable, Pasold speaks up, conveying more than impressions or exaggerations; these poems explain "what it was/ not what it was like". ~Katia Grubisic, The Globe and Mail

Pasold has an unusual ability to paint a whole emotional world. It's impossible to pluck a Pasold line out of context to show what I mean - her work is just too organic. You'll have to read the whole book, and you'll be glad you did. ~Alex Rettie, Alberta Views

A Bad Year for Journalists, in hard lines and fragmented images, evokes the bizarre world of international journalists: the surreal combination of danger and privilege that they embody and their tourist-but-not tourist relationship to the places they cover. ~Lee Shedden, Calgary Herald

A compelling cartography of war torn territory. ~Anne Burke, Prairie Journal

Pasold sneaks in mind's-eye metaphors and images, the poems carefully structured and solid, belying their driving narrative - she weaves disjointed memories, from rusty jeeps to lust to typewriter. A thrilling, amazing work. ~Bryn Evans, Fast Forward Magazine