Love, Despite the Ache

October 2016
72 pages | ISBN 978-1-928088-15-8

**Winner of the Hamilton Arts Council Literary Award for Poetry**

From the winner of the Acorn-Plantos Award and the Hamilton Literary Award for Poetry comes a deeply felt collection that confronts love, loss and our own mortality.

In Love, Despite the Ache, Chris Pannell captures the sharp pain and complicated love that accompanies his parents’ approaching deaths, and then examines, with gentleness and humour, the passage of the grief and slow resumption of life that occurs once they are gone. In lines that are clear, honest and specific, he unpacks his family histories, examining morning breakfasts and seafaring uncles, wending his way through memories that “jostle like a pack of hungry cats.” In the end, he answers his mother’s heartbreaking question of, “Christopher, will you take me home?” as only a poet can.

Reviews | Interviews | Excerpt | About the Author | Other Titles

Reviews

"Stuart Ross wins IFOA's Battle of the Bards" (Susan G. Cole, Now Magazine, 30/03/2017)
"Also impressive last night was Chris Pannell, who conveyed a series of grief-laden pieces with aching clarity."

"Pannell will read from latest book Feb. 2 in Cobourg" (Wally Keeler, Northumberland Today, 01/25/2017)
"The poems are a finely balanced dialogue between empathy and detachment. Death is shockingly extraordinary, yet banal, common. Although everyone is born with a life sentence, the endings are as variable as punctuation marks."

Putting Christmas Back Together After Mom and Dad Are Gone (Paul WIlson, Hamilton Spectator, 12/20/2016)
"I read Pannell's new book and found his words deepy moving."

Interviews

GET LIT E60 with CHRIS PANNELL (Jamie Tennant, Get Lit, 11/01/2018)
This week’s show features an interview with Hamilton author and poet Chris Pannell. Chris is a member of the LitLive committee, and recently won the Hamilton Literary Award for Poetry with his collection Love, Despite the Ache.

Excerpt

Click here to read the first few poems from Love, Despite the Ache

About the Author

Chris Pannell’s A Nervous City (2013) won the Kerry Schooley Book Award from the Hamilton Arts Council. In 2010, his book Drive (2009) won the Acorn-Plantos Award for Peoples Poetry and the Hamilton Literary Award for Poetry. From 1993 to 2005 he ran the new writing workshop and published two anthologies of work by that group. He is a former board member of the gritLIT Literary Festival and a former DARTS bus driver. He hosts and helps organize the monthly Hamilton reading series Lit Live. His latest book of poetry – Love, Despite the Ache – won the 2017 Literary Award for Poetry from the Hamilton Arts Council.

Other Titles by this Author

Adventurize Your Summer! (2023)

A Nervous City (2013)

Drive (2009)