David McGimpsey is a kind of Canadian pop-poetry hero. While his previous collections have been well received, they have also been subject to criticism questioning the relevance of pop-culture verse. Sitcom, McGimpsey’s latest collection, is a funny, kitschy, episodic, celebrity-laden read, complete with a sonnet dedicated to a TV show cancelled after one season – subject matter that would never find a home in a more soberly minded collection.

These poems negotiate the relationships between literature and TV, and postmodernity and tradition, by incorporating ultra-lowbrow has-been pop phenomena such as Hawaii Five-O into a respectable sonnet structure. The Fonz and the Golden Girls claim the same thematic importance here as ex-lovers and students, and all share epigraphs from the likes of Baudelaire, yet none of the collection’s elements seem awkward or out of place.

While Sitcom is undoubtedly fun and frivolous, it isn’t brought down by the kind of self-distracted hipster posturing found in many similar collections. Through a  cunning use of metre, rhyme, and slang, McGimpsey manages to create a dialectic between trash culture  and high art, making for poetry that is both hilarious and seriously good.