By Kevin Spenst
Expected Shipping Date: September 15, 2026
Stanley Park Manor: a Collective History brings together dozens of voices and hundreds of lives lived in one of the West End’s most iconic buildings. With previous tenants such as Pierre Berton, Simma Holt, Trish Klein (of the Be Good Tanyas), and congregations of others up to the present, this almost 100-year-old Vancouver building is steeped in stories. With the help of the former building manager, Lyn Guy, poet and author Kevin Spenst has compiled, researched, and added to accounts from actors, artists, journalists, and others. An assortment of Spenst’s lyric essays, interviews with his neighbours, and the dozens of personal accounts from others (and photos galore) make up this hybrid collection that’s part museum of miscellany and magic, and part walking tour through the building’s generations of tenants.
An ode to the poetics of coincidence and community, Stanley Park Manor celebrates the power of people coming together.
A poet, teacher, and reviewer, Kevin Spenst (he/him) has published four full-length poetry collections, most recently A Bouquet Brought Back from Space (Anvil Press, 2024) and 19 chapbooks, most recently Ghosted Under the Christmas Tree (above/ground press, 2025) and Windowful (Anstruther Press, 2025). One of the organizers of the Dead Poets Reading Series, Kevin has a chapbook review column for subTerrain magazine, occasionally co-hosts Wax Poetic on Vancouver Co-op Radio, and is one of the poetry ambassadors for Vancouver’s 2025-2027 Poet Laureate Elee Kraljii Gardiner. He’s thrilled to be one of the Poetry Mentors at The Writer’s Studio at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver on unceded xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səl̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) territory, where he cohabitates with the one and only Cheryl Rossi.
