Chris Banks’s Bureau of Useless Splendour arrives from ECW Press
Cover of Chris Banks’s Bureau of Useless Splendour: Poems, due Oct. 13 from ECW Press.
Photo credit: ECW Press
Kitchener, Ont., poet Chris Banks will release his eighth poetry collection, Bureau of Useless Splendour: Poems, on Oct 13, 2026, through Toronto-based independent publisher ECW Press. The 88-page collection follows his 2023 book Alternator. Banks’s first full-length collection, Bonfires, was published in 2003.
ECW describes Bureau of Useless Splendour as a collection concerned with human connection, pop culture and the search for understanding and hope amid economic inequality and climate change. The publisher also says Banks addresses toxic masculinity and mental health in the book.
ECW also points to poems involving DNA sequencing, internet memes and space-time physics, alongside references to Canadian nationalism and writers Gwendolyn MacEwen and Frank Stanford.
Banks lives and writes in Kitchener. His author biography lists Bureau of Useless Splendour as his eighth collection, following Alternator, released by Nightwood Editions in 2023, and Deepfake Serenade in 2021. Bonfires, his first full-length collection, won the Canadian Authors’ Association’s Jack Chalmers Award for poetry in 2004 and was a finalist for the Gerald Lampert Award. Banks is also editor-in-chief of The Woodlot, a Canadian poetry reviews and essays site.
ECW Press describes itself as an independent, Canadian-owned publisher based in Toronto. Several of Banks’s earlier collections have also appeared with ECW, including Winter Cranes, The Cloud Versus Grand Unification Theory and Midlife Action Figure.
A local launch is scheduled for Nov 26, 2026, at Waterloo Public Library’s Eastside Branch, where Banks will appear with poet Tanis MacDonald for a double book launch and conversation. The event runs from 7 to 8 p.m. and requires registration.
