The poems in Dancing Alone are drawn from the six small-press classics, all out of print, that William Hawkins published between 1964 and 1974 plus some new poems. A contemporary of George Bowering, Victor Coleman and Michael Ondaatje, Hawkins appeared in Raymond Souster's landmark anthology New Wave Canada and in Oxford's Modern Canadian Verse, where editor A.J.M. Smith positioned him between Margaret Atwood and Gwendolyn MacEwen. Readers will discover in Hawkins' work an inimitably haunting poetic voice. Hawkins was also the central figure of a richly creative Ottawa-based music scene. His fugitive pickup bands included Bruce Cockburn, David Wiffen, Colleen Peterson, Amos Garrett, Darius Brubeck and Sneezy Waters. Hawkins calls himself "a semi-retired hard rocker and high roller."

Born in 1940 in Ottawa, Ontario, legendary poet and musician William Hawkins is one of the most important artists to emerge from Canada's capital. He published six books from 1964-1974, attended the 1963 UBC Summer Poetry Seminar, organized poetry readings at Ottawa's infamous Le Hibou Coffeehouse, wrote songs and performed in bands (The Children, Heavenly Blue), and published widely in Canada's most important little magazines of the 1960s before retreating into silence in the 1970s and working as a cab driver until his retirement in 2012. The Collected Poems of William Hawkins gathers Hawkins's complete output. His books are printed alongside previously unpublished and uncollected poems including early magazine publications, the long-lost book Sweet and Sour Nothings, poems from the time of his extended silence, as well as all work produced since his gradual re-appearance in the 1990s. This volume presents the generous, defiant, idiosyncratic, and compelling work of William Hawkins in its entirety, making possible the renewed attention that this significant body of work deserves.