Poetry / Poems
North Atlantic Books,U.S. Martian
Book SynopsisWinner of the 2021 Academy of American Poets James Laughlin AwardA 2022 Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist in PoetryA blistering exploration of America?s legacy of anti-Black violence from an indispensable poet of our timeAmerican history got you down? Are you feeling alienated? Join poet James Cagney in his blistering second collection, Martian: The Saint of Loneliness, as he journeys through time, space, and memory with caustic, satirical beauty. Recall American history through its spent shell casings! Turn familial ghosts into art valuable for generations! In these fully charged poems, James Cagney storms through American fields blooming with artillery and anger on his thirsty quest for love, peace, and acceptance in the smallest, most precious gestures.
£14.39
Hackett Publishing Co, Inc Troilus and Criseyde in Modern Verse
Book SynopsisThis fast-moving Modern English version of Chaucer's greatest tragic romance highlights the poem's rapid shifts in register and diction as well as its subtle and elusive characterizations, while preserving the enchanting rhyme-royal stanza of the Middle English original. Christine Chism's Introduction illuminates the work's historical context, poetic devices, first audiences, sources, and non-traditional re-conception of a traditional female protagonist "whose faults," as Criseyde says, "are rolled on every tongue."
£13.29
Hackett Publishing Co, Inc Troilus and Criseyde in Modern Verse
Book SynopsisThis fast-moving Modern English version of Chaucer's greatest tragic romance highlights the poem's rapid shifts in register and diction as well as its subtle and elusive characterizations, while preserving the enchanting rhyme-royal stanza of the Middle English original. Christine Chism's Introduction illuminates the work's historical context, poetic devices, first audiences, sources, and non-traditional re-conception of a traditional female protagonist "whose faults," as Criseyde says, "are rolled on every tongue."
£36.89
Hackett Publishing Co, Inc Haft Paykar: A Medieval Persian Romance
Book Synopsis"It was a refreshing, old-fashioned pleasure to read Julie Scott Meisami’s verse translation of, and introduction and notes to, this twelfth-century Persian allegorical romance." —Orhan Pahmuk, in the Times Literary SupplementTrade Review"The Haft Paykar—Nizami's twelfth-century masterpiece, written in the Persian verse couplet form known as masnavi—has waited a long time for a translation like this: one that simultaneously captures its lightness and charm and plumbs its wealth of cultural detail. Julie Meisami's deft, accurate, seemingly effortless version (rendered in English tetrameter, an inspired choice) is a rare accomplishment." —Michael Beard, University of North Dakota"Nizami's Haft Paykar is a deep, enduring work of literature, one that can be appreciated as psychological bildungsroman, fairytale, spiritual quest, and adventure tale. Meisami is a leading scholar of the classical Persian literary tradition, and her translation—the first full modern English rendering, and the only one to be based on a critical edition of the Persian text—pays close attention to the literary qualities of the poem." —Franklin Lewis, University of Chicago"Meisami is one of the foremost specialists in Persian literature alive today. Her translation of the Haft Paykar not only makes available for the general reader one of the classics of Persian literature, but enriches it with an extensive introduction and notes of the highest quality." —Jawid Mojaddedi, Rutgers University
£50.14
Hackett Publishing Co, Inc Complete Poems and Fragments
Book Synopsis"In this expanded edition of his distinguished Sappho: Poems and Fragments (2002), Stanley Lombardo offers over 100 fragments not included in the original edition, as well as the new poems discovered in 2004 and 2014. His translation of this latter material yields fresh insights into Sappho's representations of old age, two of her brothers, and her special relationship with Aphrodite. Pamela Gordon’s engaging, balanced, and informative Introduction has been revised to incorporate discussion of the new fragments, which subtly alter our previous understanding of the archaic poet’s corpus. Complete Poems and Fragments also offers a useful updated bibliography, as well as a section on 'Elegiac Sappho' that presents the reception of the Lesbian poet in later Greek and Latin elegiac poems. A wonderful find for any Greekless reader searching for a complete and up-to-date Sappho. —Patricia A. Rosenmeyer, Department of Classics, University of Wisconsin–MadisonTrade Review"Very good indeed to have a complete and up-to-date Sappho for the non-specialist reader, and especially one with such an intelligent and helpful Introduction to the poet herself." —Jenny March, in The Reading Room, classicsforall.org.uk
£39.09
Hackett Publishing Co, Inc Paradiso
Book SynopsisLike his groundbreaking Inferno (Hackett, 2009) and Purgatorio (Hackett, 2016), Stanley Lombardo's Paradiso features a close yet dynamic verse translation, innovative verse paragraphing for reader-friendliness, and a facing-page Italian text. It also offers an extraordinarily helpful set of notes and headnotes as well as Introduction—all designed for first-time readers of the canticle—by Alison Cornish.Trade Review"Lombardo makes Dante's verses come alive in so many ways that this crowning achievement stands on its own as inspired poetry, readily comprehensible and reliably attentive to the many different registers that the Florentine poet incorporates in his text. Despite its reputation as the most challenging of the three canticles, the Paradiso, in Lombardo's dramatically charged version, becomes remarkably transparent. . . . As is characteristic of his previous translations, Lombardo addresses his version of Paradiso not only to readers but also to listeners and succeeds in recreating the various stages on which the Comedy was originally received and presented: private readings at home and more public oral performances either for small, intimate groups within the palazzo walls or before large crowds in the town square. . . . In her fine Introduction, instructive headnotes to individual cantos, and extensive explanatory endnotes, Alison Cornish provides all the information necessary for a profitable reading of the Paradiso. . . . This handsome bilingual edition is a welcome addition to the large and ever increasing number of annotated translations of Dante's Comedy." —Christopher Kleinhenz, Carol Mason Kirk Professor Emeritus of Italian, University of Wisconsin–Madison"The distinctive combination of Lombardo's lucid rendering of Dante's poem with Cornish's judicious commentary will make this volume a remarkable resource for both new and seasoned readers. It not only provides the necessary coordinates to comprehend Dante's daring description of eternity but also offers new insights about the work’s relation to its historical, philosophical, and literary contexts." —Martin Eisner, Associate Professor of Romance Studies, Duke University"This translation and commentary are an essential contribution to Dante's reception in English. Stanley Lombardo's translation is accurate, elegant, and transparent, a mirror of the original text. Alison Cornish's commentary is lucid, graceful, and precise, with just the right level of detail; it penetrates and opens the Paradiso's philosophical, scientific, and theological dimensions with authority, balance, sensitivity, and simplicity. Perhaps now more readers will follow Dante to Paradise." —Christian Moevs, Associate Professor of Italian, University of Notre Dame
£49.29
Hackett Publishing Co, Inc Gilgamesh
Book SynopsisThis stirring new version of the great Babylonian epic includes material from the recently discovered "monkey tablet" as well as an Introduction, timeline, glossary, and correspondences between lines of the translation and those of the original texts. "A comprehensive Introduction with a light touch (Beckman), a poetic rendering with verve and moxie (Lombardo): This edition of the colossal Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic should satisfy all readers who seek to plumb its wealth and depth without stumbling over its many inconvenient gaps and cruxes. A fine gift to all lovers of great literature."—Jack M. Sasson, Emeritus Professor, Vanderbilt University and The University of North Carolina at Chapel HillTrade Review"Stanley Lombardo’s new Gilgamesh weighs in at a slim 91 pages, including useful front and back matter as well as newly discovered segments from the middle of the story, the so-called Monkey Tablet. . . . Similar to other books produced by Hackett to serve study in liberal arts and humanities, Lombardo’s work is attractive without being ornate and is easily affordable for the college market. It is furnished with auxiliary materials to enhance the ability of a student (or a nonspecialist instructor) to contextualize and navigate an ancient and non-Western primary text. Gary Beckman's introduction is an excellent overview of the five-millennia-old literary tradition about Gilgamesh, legendary king of the historical ancient city of Uruk, and provides an account of the discovery and decipherment of cuneiform that is remarkably concise and comprehensible. . . . Additional material includes an 'About This Edition' section, a timeline, a glossary of proper names, suggestions for further reading, and a table showing how pages in Lombardo’s version correspond with lines of the original text. . . . Lombardo's contribution to the Gilgamesh tradition offers English-language readers a pleasurable, companionable, and rewarding entryway to a very long and ancient humanistic legacy." —Kathryn Slanski, Yale University, in Review of Biblical Literature
£13.29
Hackett Publishing Co, Inc Gilgamesh
Book SynopsisThis stirring new version of the great Babylonian epic includes material from the recently discovered "monkey tablet" as well as an Introduction, timeline, glossary, and correspondences between lines of the translation and those of the original texts. "A comprehensive Introduction with a light touch (Beckman), a poetic rendering with verve and moxie (Lombardo): This edition of the colossal Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic should satisfy all readers who seek to plumb its wealth and depth without stumbling over its many inconvenient gaps and cruxes. A fine gift to all lovers of great literature."—Jack M. Sasson, Emeritus Professor, Vanderbilt University and The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
£33.29
Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. Argonautica
£17.09
Simon And Schuster Group USA Gay Heaven Is A Dance Floor but I Cant Relax
Book Synopsis
£14.99
Fulton Books Inconsiderate Bastard
Book Synopsis
£9.45
The New York Review of Books, Inc Medusa Beach
Book SynopsisA new collection from one of the most exciting voices in American poetry.For many years, Melissa Monroe has been assembling one of the most distinctive bodies of work in contemporary American poetry, drawing on all different kinds of writing, from technical manuals to books of spells to dictionaries of slang, to explore the many ways—poetry is, after all, one of them—in which we human beings seek to know and control the elusive realities of the world around and within us. Her subject is both the strangeness of things and the strangeness of the things we think, and she has an unsurpassed eye for the wilderness between them that we inhabit. The poems collected in Medusa Beach include “Planetogenesis,” recording the life of an imaginary planet; “Whiz Mob,” a sequence of haikus composed in the criminal argot of 1940s America; “Frequently Asked Questions About Spirit Photography”; and the title poem, which interweaves an account of the life and thought of the great German philosopher and marine biologist Ernst Haeckel with a meditation on the many historical and natural historical avatars of the figure of Medusa. As formally adventurous as they are rigorous, disconcertingly comic, and deeply strange, the poems in Medusa Beach are the work of a true American original.
£13.49
The New York Review of Books, Inc Daybreak
Book SynopsisA bilingual collection of poetry, from elegies to poem memoirs, by a revered French master.For more than four decades Claire Malroux has blazed a unique path in contemporary French poetry. She is influenced by such French poets as Mallarmé and Yves Bonnefoy, but her work also bears the mark, and this is unusual in France, of Anglophone poets like Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Bishop, and Derek Walcott. A prominent translator of poetry from English into French, Malroux is one of those rare poets whose work is informed by a day-to-day intimacy with a second language in its greatest variations and subtleties. Her poems move between an intense but philosophical and abstract interiority and an acute engagement with the material world. This bilingual selection by the award-winning poet and translator Marilyn Hacker presents Malroux’s oeuvre, from her early lyric poems to an excerpt from A Long-Gone Sun—a poem-memoir of life in southern France before and during World War II—to new and uncollected poems, including an elegiac sequence written after the death of her life partner, the writer Pierre Silvain.
£16.99
The New York Review of Books, Inc Nachoem M. Wijnberg
Book SynopsisA new translation of work by one of the Netherland''s most innovative, exhilarating poets, a poet who draws on everything from economics to parables to world history. The Dutch poet Nachoem M. Wijnberg is one of the most inventive, surprising, entertaining, and thought-provoking poets writing today. He is also remarkably productive, so that up to now only a small portion of his extensive body of work has appeared in English translation. This new selection of poems draws on all twenty volumes Wijnberg has published to date, constituting an indispensable introduction to this wry, off-kilter, spellbinding modern master. Wijnberg, not only a poet but a professor of business studies—hence his persistent concern with questions of value, real and false—writes only in the plainest language while displaying a formidable erudition. His poems engage economics, philosophy, and history; he writes Chinese poems and Jewish poems and classic songs; he tells stories that may or may not be parables; he writes from where the mind meets the heart. “Tell all the truth but tell it slant,” Emily Dickinson enjoins. Wijnberg for his part has said, “Alienation is the last thing I am trying to achieve. The world is strange enough as it is and my poems help in dealing with that strangeness by bringing it close and as far as possible trying to understand it.”
£15.29
Loom Press Millrat
Book Synopsis"The poems in Millrat are full of blessed and flawed humanity, based on author Michael Casey’s experience working in a textile mill in Lowell, Massachusetts, in the 1960s. This is a 25th anniversary edition of the book, with additional poems plus commentary by early reviewers and contemporary writers. The book gained national attention when first released in 1996. Poet Michael Casey writes, “My writing about the mills stemmed from the jobs during summers from college, undergrad school at the Lowell Technological Institute (LTI, now University of Massachusetts, Lowell) and then later when on leave from the State University of New York in Buffalo. A friend told me not to give the phony impression that the jobs there were at that time my career. Mention that here in compliance. I did not always work at a textile mill but for a book’s setting in Lowell, the textile mill was appropriate. Lowell was where the other American revolution began. History. The Industrial Revolution. For any writer at any time you are apt to write about what you are doing. I have to say think of Robert Frost and apple picking or Fred Voss at the airplane factory and writing about factory work is not restricted to men. I can recommend here the wonderful books by Inez Holden. Author Jeanne Schinto wrote in The Nation magazine: “In 1972, when Michael Casey was twenty-four, he won the Yale Younger Poets award with a book called Obscenities. Stanley Kunitz called it “the first significant book of poems written by an American to spring from the war in Vietnam.” . . . “Casey didn’t see action in Vietnam; he was in the military police, assigned to the highway patrol and gate-guard duty. So it’s no wonder that very little of Obscenities is about combat; instead, many of the poems illuminate the Army’s pecking order and its hyper-logical nonsense. In Millrat, Casey explores the mill hierarchy, at times even more complex than the military’s, since the rules there are less rigid and the consequences of disobeying them less certain. You may not lose your job, but you may lose face, which is often more valued. . . .” Poet Helena Minton says, “Michael Casey’s Millrat, first published twenty-five years ago by Adastra Press in western Massachusetts, is a novel distilled, spoken in a series of distinctly American voices. These laconic, but visceral poems, with their blunt language, immerse us in the world of a textile mill, featuring characters whose mishaps, trials and escapades sometimes land them “on the outside lookin in.” “In deceptively simple, yet startlingly original lines, Casey uses true sleight-of-hand. The job at the mill involves heavy machinery, dangerous chemicals and working with others who can’t be counted on for much of anything. Even moments of downtime—at the coffee truck, a softball game, a picnic, or signing up for the company betting pool, with its byzantine rules—are fraught with complications. On first reading, we might be tempted look at the world of the millrat as absurd, but it is all too real, and we laugh at our own peril. Thanks to Loom Press, Millrat will remain in print. It already has the feel of a classic, and should be widely read and re-read."
£18.89
Wendy's Subway Glaring
Book SynopsisGlaring: a sustained look of anger, an obvious fact, a situation of such brightness and intensity that vision is obscured. In his debut book of poems, Benjamin Krusling is concerned with reading domination and violence and entering their psychotic motion, the better to do otherwise. Through the thicket of anti-blackness, militarism, surveillance, impoverishment, and interpersonal abuse and violence, Glaring investigates the things that haunt daily life and make love difficult, possible, necessary. Benjamin Krusling''s Glaring is the winner of our 2019 Open Reading Period, and was selected by guest judge Lucy Ives. It is the first book in the Passage Series. PraiseGlaring is a beautiful and powerful, brilliant collection, combining energies of various modernisms with elegant maneuverings through the bleak media of contemporary America. Concerned with institutionsrace, health, school, sports, police, family, money, historyas well as the shifting fortunes of affection and the self, these poems utterly transform two other well-worn institutions: the lyric and the page. Every line in this indelible book was my favorite. Lucy Ives (2019 Open Reading Period Guest Judge)It is alarming to find what you are looking for, which is what I have found in the work of Ben Krusling. His writing is sensitive, skittish, seems to have no proper skin; its unmediated effects are both intoxicating and mystifying, insofar as he appears to have no truck with literary fashions or forms. While the surface of the work is magical; the interior is confrontational and wise. I find myself with a thinker who arrives where het love is a freaky war machine. I hate the moment things begin to feel only intellectual, he writes. Does he love, then, being with the shock and energy of perceiving emotion as an aggregate and multidimensional thing, now partly digital? I don''t know. The power of Ben''s work is so undeniable, it''s confusing to think about its singularity, which is a hint that it is from the future. Simone White Glaring hurtles its reader deep into formal consideration's command center, framing every punctum with queries of relation and autonomy. This text is a world where a title may hold as much as its referent, where the next work might begin inside its predecessor, where theater is stripped down to its circuitry and the charge within the performance of all language is laid bare. Benjamin Krusling's nuanced graphical grammar is ecstatic in its quiet powers, and its scaffold of structural freedom finds tender affinity with the work's overarching actionexperimental reportage on explorations of an expansive interior landscape cracked open with softness. Throughoutheralding interiority and formare a flickering bouquet parade of the unpaired insisting on their wholeness as is, insisting on their celebration as self. The work is ripe with fracturing's urgency to show the ways of new wholeness, and blackness shines everywhere like slivers of light. Adjua Gargi Nzinga GreavesAbout the authorBenjamin Krusling (b. 1990, Cincinnati) is the author of a chapbook, GRAPES (Projective Industries, 2018) and a text-image project, I have too much to hide (forthcoming from Triple Canopy, 2020). Prose and poems have appeared in Hyperallergic, The New Inquiry, Black Warrior Review, Denver Quarterly, Territory, The Recluse, Washington Square Review, and Tagvverkand work has been awarded the Sonora Review Poetry Prize in addition to Pushcart Prize nominations. He has been awarded the Amiri Baraka scholarship from Naropa University and supported by residencies at the Vermont Studio Center and the Blue Mountain Center. His work has been anthologized in the Bodies Built for Game anthology of contemporary sports writing and presented at The Poetry Project, The Kitchen, the Segue Foundation, the University of Pennsylvania's Kelly Writers House and other venues. Benjamin received an MFA from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop where he was awarded an Iowa Arts Fellowship and a postgraduate Provost's Visiting Writer fellowship. He lives in Brooklyn.
£12.82
Dementi Milestone Publishing Walking in Williamsburg: A Life in Words
Book SynopsisA book of poetry. Many of us have sacred places that we return to throughout our lives that serve as both anchors and crucibles. Some that exist physically and some that are forever etched in our minds. Sacred places, that both form our foundation of self while also helping us burn off the non-essential baggage we accumulate in life that may be holding us back, or is of limited or no value to us.
£26.34
Write on the Tyne Publishing Changing Futures
Book Synopsis
£9.79
Spinifex Press Limen
Book SynopsisWhen two women and a dog set off on a holiday they have no inkling of what’s to come. They wake to find the river has crept up silently during the night. Trapped by floodwater, they devise escape routes only to be faced with more obstacles at every turn. Only the dog remains calm. This novella grips you with its language, its pace, its anxieties.Trade Review"If you are uncertain about novels in verse, this would be a great one to try. The story is easy to follow; the language spare and beautiful, but accessible... Limen is a beautiful read... The text is supported by simple, stylish, irregularly interspersed, black and white illustrations -- a lizard, tire tracks, patterns in the mud." -- Whispering Gum book blog"I feel a little voyeuristic reading this novella, as if I have been let in, a little, to a world of women where I have never been." -- Patrick McCauleyLovely review of Susan Hawthorne's Limen in Rochford Street Review
£15.26
Spinifex Press Lupa and Lamb
Book SynopsisThis collection of imagist poems combines mythology, archaeology and translation. Susan Hawthorne draws on the history and prehistory of Rome and its neighbours to explore how the past is remembered. Under the guidance of Curatrix, Director of the Musæum Matricum, and Latin poet, Sulpicia, travellers Diana and Agnese are led through the mythic archives about wolves and sheep before attending an epoch-breaking party to which they are invited by Empress Livia.Trade Review"Lupa and Lamb is a remarkable achievement from a gifted poet. Hawthorne's book is a gem and a 'must-read' for anyone interested in women's spiritual traditions, women's history, mythology, archeology, and archeomythology." Mary Saracino, the Goddess Pages. Feb 2014. See her complete review below!'Lupa and Lamb' begins with a descent into the unknown in the cave of the Sibilla Cumana, and then swirling through stars and constellations. Susan Hawthorne encompasses la grande bellezza (sweet Roma where else would you want to be?), leading us to the emotional leap into other realms / a transit out of time into timelessness to find the unfound and unfindable.Marina Morbiducci, Professor of English Language and Translation, Sapienza University, RomeWhod have thought that erudition could be so exotic, erotic and dazzlingly entertaining? In this triumphantly inventive excursion into feminist revisionism, Hawthorne is fully mistress of language and genre as she brings her Roman women into view in the diverse roles lover, poet, prostitute, martyr and the sometimes dark fates that await them as living instances of she-wolf and lamb.Jennifer Strauss AMThis vibrant collection of lyric poetry exhumes female ardour from among old male traditions. It asks us again and again why we are not open to the emotional rhythms that come down to us from the Aegean and from Rome: but also from mythic vibrations that were awake even far earlier. These poems ask us to wake up and live.Chris Wallace-Crabbe AMReading Susan Hawthorne's 'Lupa and Lamb', I was transported back to a time of wondering and wandering. Where bones and museum artefacts lose their dryness, become fully fleshed and whisper their stories intimately in your ear. Here the full pagan glory of Italy meets the inquisitive and absorbing gaze of Australian poet Susan Hawthornes eye. Heartbreaking, sensual and unexpectedly funny.Kavisha Mazzella, singer and songwriterCombining erudition with emotion and eroticism, intellect with imagination, Susan Hawthorne weaves womens forgotten history into a magic web of remembering and re-imagining. With her playful juxtapositions of words, names, times, places and species, she shows there is freedom in not forgetting, and that the world could have been can be different.Robyn Arianrhod, author of 'Seduced by Logic'Susan Hawthorne has created a wonderfully rich imaginative poetic tapestry, weaving together fragments of lost and found memories, mythology, archaeology, ancient languages and modern cosmology. An erudite feminist, once again thought provoking and fun.Meryl Waugh, PhD (Astrophysics), University of MelbourneSusan Hawthornes words honour ancient inspirations, revive and celebrate the past and transport the reader to new horizons.Powhiri Wharemarama Rika-Heke, Learning Leader, Social Sciences, Alfriston College'Lupa and Lamb' which follows the root and transformation of languages through their own transmigration, is more than poetry, more than history, more than a mnemonic tool which can assists the initiated in re-engaging with women centred psychology. At the core of 'Lupa and Lamb' is a treatise in confronting and understanding the self in the present, through a panoramic prism of the mythical past.Lella Cariddi, poet, artist, curatorReading 'Lupa and Lamb' is not like opening Pandoras box. The treasures released: poetry that redeems the voices and torn whispers of millennia of women, give only delight. Playful Curatrix eases us through ancient languages, myths and the intricate details of love and lust. Always we are reminded that poiesis is fabrication, creation and re-making; this is how the past can be found and reworked into divine gifts.Lyn Hatherly, author of 'Acts of Abrasion and Sapphos Sweetbitter Songs'a complicated and dense book. Wonderfully written and so much depth in it.Robyn Rowland AO, author of 'Seasons of Doubt and Burning'Inspired by her residency at the Whiting Studio in Rome, Susan Hawthorne's 'Lupa and Lamb' explores the mysteries of ancient sites and treasures in Rome and nearby countries, linking the past with the present, and collecting hidden treasures the archaeologists have missed. Poems, plays and 'lost texts' of women through the ages are presented in words and imagery that offer sensual and intellectual delights. This is translation in its widest sense - a collection to be treasured and reread.Elaine Lewis, author of 'Left Bank Waltz'Susan Hawthorne has created a lovely, lively combination of leaning, intellect, passion and fun in 'Lupa and Lamb'. Both profound and playful, these poems entertain, uplift and inform. Curatrixs offering at the beginning and the end are a particular delight as was/is the mixing up of time. Pat Rosier, author of 'Where the Heart Is'""Susan Hawthorne, polyglot scholar and poet, invites you too to a party of countless women across the ages! The talk's torrential, the company fascinating, the cultural crossovers dizzying. Expect the unexpected - Pope Francis, Nauru, love-song and prayer, and Palaeolithic Lupa across the table.Judith Rodriguez AM
£13.50
Spinifex Press Accidents of Composition
Book SynopsisThe eyes catch a black bird close to an eerie sun. Instantly, a poem: an accident of composition. Or a tree, rock, light from a story heard, dreamt, read or remembered returns as if it were the only tree, rock, light in the planet. The poet is caught, returned to her first heart: poetry. After four novels, Merlinda offers seventy-six poems from the stillness of contemplation to the spinning of tales, then to passage across different histories. Glass becomes eternal greens underwater, fish gossip about colonisation, a gumnut turns dissident, and the dreams of Captain Cook and Pigafetta circumnavigate the globe leaving a trail of blood, beads, and the scent of cloves. But in between, the poet hopes: ‘there could be accidents / of kindness here.’
£13.25
Guernica Editions Two Tales Jamali Kamali and ZundelState
Book Synopsis
£12.30
University of Alberta Press Trying Again to Stop Time: Selected Poems
Book Synopsis“It’s a losing battle: my words have no chance against time. Sometimes, unable to catch up with imagination, I leave the battle, candle in hand, in complete darkness.” — from “Trying Again to Stop Time" Jalal Barzanji chronicles the path of exile and estrangement from his beloved native Kurdistan to his chosen home in Canada. His poems speak of the tension that exists between the place of one’s birth and an adoptive land, of that delicate dance that happens in the face of censorship and oppression. In defiance of Saddam Hussein’s call for sycophantic political verse, he turns to the natural world to reference a mournful state of loss, longing, alienation, and melancholy. Barzanji’s poetry is infused with the richness of the Middle East, but underlying it all is a close affinity to Western Modernists. In those moments where language and culture collide and co-operate, Barzanji carves out a strong voice of opposition to political oppression. Readers will return to his work again and again, just as viewers return to a favourite painting. “Like contemporary poets Taslima Nasrin, Adonis, Yehuda Amichai, and Shuntaro Tanikawa, Barzanji’s is a voice in which the native willingly mutates into the global.” — Sabah A. Salih, TranslatorTrade Review"...it will be easy for readers to connect with Barzanji's writing, because his words seep with humanity's universal emotions and occurrences." -- Safa Jinje * Quill & Quire *On the Edmonton Journal's Bestsellers list (Edmonton Fiction) for the week of May 8, 2015 * Edmonton Journal *Today's book of poetry believes that poetry connects us, makes us more human.... Barzanji has been part of an oppressed minority in his own country, an exile, a refugee and an immigrant…. By illuminating his world of exile Barzanji shines a light on the whole world. His poems are witness and journey…. Barzanji has a surprisingly light touch considering the depths he is mining, it surprises the reader again and again.... Jalal Barzanji's story is a familiar one but it is not often shared, rendered into art. These poems shine." -- Michael Dennis"The poetry itself is political, personal and interrogating. It asks questions of governments, of individuals in power and of ourselves as citizens, readers, and artists. While the poems cross boundaries and decades, Barzanji’s work is intensely immediate, while always acknowledging the swift passage of time... Barzanji’s voice is warm, accessible, and occasionally humorous. He does not shy from the seriousness of politics and war, but reminds us that within those larger spheres beats an individual heart, alone or—one would hope—next to another." [Full review at http://arcpoetry.ca/?p=8993] -- Kimmy Beach * Arc Poetry Magazine *Nice, intimate, vertical format that works beautifully for the poems, with a simple typographical palette... Benjamin Shaykin, Juror, Association of American University Presses: Book, Jacket, and Journal Show 2016“The Kurdish question stands tall in our age as yet another emblematic paradigm of the violence enacted on a people in the name of the nation-state. Barzanji’s poetry is lovely, with frequent piercing tender moments and visions of the daily and the ordinary. The translation reads smoothly and naturally, highlighting the spoken quality of the poems, the loving and wounded quality of their speaker.” Fady Joudah, translator of Ghassan Zaqtan's Like a Straw Bird It Follows Me, and Other Poems, winner of the 2013 International Griffin Poetry PrizeTable of Contentsix Foreword Sabah A. Salih xiii Preface Trying Again to Stop Time (2009) 2 Trying Again to Stop Time 4 A Soulful Sunshine 6 Beauty’s Fault 8 Smart Poems I 11 Winter Is the Season of Grief 15 Home in a Suitcase 18 The Pocket 20 I Didn’t Want to Leave Alone 22 Returning to Autumn I Want To Be Named Home (2007) 24 To Go Back and Back 34 Beyond the Sky Is a Blue Window 36 A Woman Befriends Darkness 37 To Be Free and Lonely 39 Even Autumn Had No Room In Memory of a Person Swept By the Wind (2006) 42 In Memory of a Person Swept By the Wind 43 A Terrible Morning 44 Too Late for Watching the Sunset 45 The Last Refuge 49 Smart Poems II The Rain of Compassion (2002) 52 War 53 Hello Exile 55 Life Coming to an End 56 Nature’s Playground 57 The Fallen Doves 58 The Rain of Compassion 60 Untitled 61 The Sun Ignores My Boat No Warmth (1985) 68 Keeping to Oneself 69 Midlife 70 My Heart and Water 71 Shouting at the World 72 The End of Conflicts 73 An Old Desire 74 The Shade’s Wound 75 Water’s Limitation 76 Before Leaving 77 The Most Depressing Time 78 The Wind of Exile 79 Winter’s Response 80 Burial 81 A Lonely Flower 82 The Shrine 83 To Be Naked Again 84 After the Storm 85 His Soul Returned to Us 86 The Anthem of Departure The Evening Snow Dance (1979) 88 A View 89 An Accident 90 That Evening 91 The Immortal Lorca 92 A Poet and a Suitcase 93 The Lantern 94 No Return 95 A Legend 96 Returning 97 A New Cloud 98 Always Anxious 99 Our Breakup 100 The Shade 101 To Be Surrounded 102 To Love 104 A Visit 105 Having No Need for Fire 106 The Evening Snow Dance 107 The Meadow 108 The Fish Eagle 109 The Dance of the Waves 110 That Tree 111 Your Heart 112 Any Time You Come 113 The Death of a Poet 114 The Kindness of Trees 115 Separation 116 A Layer of Dust 117 Falling in Love New Poems (2012–) 120 Where Am I? 121 The Shadow of a Wall 123 Together, Alone 125 Glossary 127 Acknowledgements
£16.14
University of Alberta Press Standard candles
Book SynopsisLike the ever-widening universe, Standard candles expands on Alice Major’s earlier themes of family, mythology, and cosmology, teasing out subtle wonders in form and subject. Her voice resonates through experiments with old and new poetic forms as she imbues observed and imagined phenomena—from the centres of galaxies to the mysteries of her own backyard—with the most grounded and grounding moments of human experience. In Standard candles, readers will find an emotional dimension that seamlessly intersects with the dimensions of space and time. Fans of Alice Major will enjoy seeing her work through familiar themes, while readers new to her poetry will discover unexplored universes. Alice Major emigrated from Scotland at the age of eight, and grew up in Toronto before coming west to work as a weekly newspaper reporter. She served as Edmonton’s first poet laureate and has been inducted into the city’s cultural hall of fame. A widely-published author, she has won many distinctions. Her most recent book is Intersecting Sets: A Poet Looks at Science, which received the Wilfrid Eggleston Award for Nonfiction as well as a National Magazine Award gold medal. Her website is www.alicemajor.com. Let us compare cosmologies There is a beginning and a middle. There is an arc of narrative. There is a word, a large engraved initial. There is imperative— a cause, a god. Or not. There is an end. A purpose. Or maybe none. There is a plot with reasons, reason. There is a circus, a theatre stage of space and time. There are equations at the bottom or the top. There is a pantheon of matter, motion, scattered photons. And the questions every universe expects: what came before? What happens next?Trade Review"Alice Major’s 10th poetry collection, Standard candles, covers a huge distance in its slim text, racing through a dozen different poetic forms and countless cosmologies. It references everything from Greek mythology to quantum uncertainty to Henrietta Swan Leavitt, the inventor of the standard candle itself. The book is like an ultra-dense kernel containing all things—history, theology, astronomy, geometry, an infinite list. It’s the universe right before the Big Bang, titanic forces contained within a few thousand tightly packed words, almost ready to explode and race endlessly out." [Full review at http://bit.ly/1W6w7s5] -- Bruce Cinnamon * Vue Weekly *#6 on the Edmonton Journal's Bestsellers list (Edmonton Nonfiction) for the week of November 06 2015. * The Edmonton Journal *#10 on the Edmonton Journal's Bestsellers list for the week of November 13, 2015. * The Edmonton Journal *"In her latest poetry collection, Standard candles, Alice Major continues to draw from science as a source of metaphor to ground the big ideas floating around the universe. Like Carl Sagan and Neil deGrasse Tyson, who bring scientific concepts to a public consciousness in their documentary television shows, Major takes up the poet's essential challenge to make grand concepts accessible and relatable to the reader. The result is a collection of thoughtfully crafted suites that feel mythological or biblical in scale, yet as familiar and common as our offices or kitchens.... In reading Standard candles, there is the potential for a most palpable experience of having one's mind blown. Readers will certainly find themselves putting the book down to stare out the window at the night sky and feel a sense of loneliness wrapped in communion." Prairie Books Now, Fall/Winter 2015 -- Steve Locke * Prairie Books Now *#9 on the Edmonton Journal's Bestsellers list for the week of January 16, 2016. * The Edmonton Journal *"In her poetry she uses her knowledge of specialised – even arcane – fields in the same way that British playwrights Tom Stoppard and Michael Frayn have done: to provide startling and vivid analogies with the human dynamics of a complex emotional universe with which her readers will be more familiar. This is a handsomely produced and carefully organized book, divided into themed sections.... This substantial collection gives ample evidence of Major’s poetic craft and verbal dexterity.... [A] fine collection." [Full review at http://bit.ly/1PbKz4e] -- Michael Bartholomew-Biggs * londongrip.co.uk *"The result is a study of the universe, certainly, but also of childhood wonder, hardscrabble wisdom and inevitable grief... To Major, [standard candles] isn't just euphonious, it's a poignant metaphor for mortality, loss and the connectedness of all things." -- Brent Wittmeier * Edmonton Journal *"...one of Alice Major’s strengths is her ability to introduce an idea as sweeping as ‘science’ and distill it down to a moment, a memory, an object. No one but Major could have written this book: in a way no other poet consistently does, she grasps the edges of the universe and pulls it into a headlock. Her work has the precision of Leonard Cohen (whom she purposely invokes): a rare ability to condense the monumental into the quietly personal." [Full review at http://bit.ly/1Tg3uwA] -- Kimmy Beach * ARC Poetry Magazine *"[In Standard candles, Major] has everything that I most love, most want, in poetry: wit, startling originality, the power to move without a shred of sentimentality or manipulation – and perhaps most of all, the ability to take you somewhere new both intellectually and experientially.” [Full post at http://bit.ly/25SHtqn] -- Katherine Venn * anthonywilsonpoetry.com *"In this book Major provides us with some STEAM, i.e., Science Technology Engineering Art Math! She uses geometry, math and theories as entry points into slices of domestic life. Her poems are precise in their diction, dense in their content, and technically proficient. The entire work is a dense and beautiful existential rumination. The comparisons and metaphors are fresh and unexpected." -- Juror, 2016 Stephan G. Stephansson Award"Standard candles is also a poetic inquiry of sorts – a skillful exploration of the overlap between poetry and science/mathematics. The poems range from abstract and philosophical to imagery-rich and personal. The book asks questions and puts forward theories that playfully push at the bounds of both science and poetry – for example, positing a pantheon of gods and goddesses in charge of various aspects of the universe and its creation. A high level of poetic skill informs this work, and the sections build upon one another to create a complex and varied collection." -- Juror, 2016 Stephan G. Stephansson Award"Standard candles works on so many levels. It demonstrates the capacity of poetry to make connections between subjects of varying complexities with very intentional word combinations, strong sounds, complete conceits, different forms and material grounded in the quotidian, scientific and mythical. Each chapter, with a consistent theme or question and built upon, has a strength that if extracted they could easily stand on their own like an individual collection. Throughout, the individual poems are exceptional, each feeling complete because of their spine or axis that the theme(s), conceits and word choices support." -- Juror, 2016 Stephan G. Stephansson AwardTable of Contentsxi Sonnet for Valentine’s The set of all gods 2 The god of prime numbers 3 The god of infinities 4 The god of symmetry 5 The god of gravity 6 The god of salt 7 The god of kites and darts 8 The god of quantum uncertainty 9 The god of probabilities 10 The baker god 11 The god of automata 12 The god of teapots 14 The god of cats 16 The god of sparrows 17 The god of hearts 18 The jeweller god 19 The god of dark 20 The god of memory 21 The muse of universes Ordinary matter 24 Ordinary matter 26 Vacuum fluctuations 27 The helium thoughts 28 Advice to the lovelorn 30 Three-body problem 31 Love in three dimensions 32 Heavy elements 33 Local bubble 34 Catechism Standard candles 40 1 Address | 1959 42 2 Clouds of glory | 1908 45 3 Pythagorean theorem | 1965 46 4 Triangulation | 1808 49 5 The end of greatness | 2000 51 6 In the Castle of Stars | 1576 54 7 Supernova Type 1A | 1997 57 8 Then death returns 59 9 In all that void 60 10 Looking out to the dark | December 1928 62 11 d = (X- x)2 + (Y- y)2 + (Z- z)2 - c(T-t)2 | now 64 A prayer to bring you home Muscle of difficulty 68 Muscle of difficulty 70 Yet another crack in the foundation 72 Day’s eye 74 Expanding space 76 The movers’ dilemma 78 Rectangularization of the morbidity curve 80 Now, that amphibious moment 81 To the generations that will live a thousand years 82 Last scattering surface Let us compare cosmologies 86 1 Let us compare cosmologies 87 2 The Orphic follower 88 3 A pope 89 4 The evangelist 90 5 The philosophical skeptic 91 6 The nihilist 92 7 The totalitarian 93 8 The survivalist 94 9 The optimist 95 10 The magician 96 11 The baker 97 12 The consumer 98 13 The funeral director 99 14 The Manichean 100 15 The artist Sins and virtues 102 Avarice 104 Lust 105 Gluttony 107 Envy 108 Pride 110 Anger 111 Sloth 113 Mercy 115 Hope Shifting wavelengths 118 Tortoise and fern 120 Fingers of God 121 The barber’s paradox 122 Zeno’s paradox 123 Twin paradox 124 Sand reckonings: Eubulides’ paradox 125 Honeycomb conjectures 127 Bee violet 128 Optical molasses 129 Life adapts to inhospitable environments 130 How to tell a Martian my heart is on the left Underworlds 132 Persephone and I are underground 135 The outer dark 138 Cocytus 142 Niflheim 145 The man with no hands 147 Each of us the centre of a circle Postscript 150 God submits a grant application to the Canada Council 153 Notes 163 Acknowledgements
£16.14
University of Alberta Press 100 Days
Book Synopsis100 days... 100 days that should not have been... 100 days the world could have stopped. But did not. For 100 days, Juliane Okot Bitek recorded the lingering nightmare of the Rwandan genocide in a poem—each poem recalling the senseless loss of life and of innocence. Okot Bitek draws on her own family's experience of displacement under the regime of Idi Amin, pulling in fragments of the poetic traditions she encounters along the way: the Ugandan Acholi oral tradition of her father—the poet Okot p'Bitek; Anglican hymns; the rhythms and sounds of the African American Spiritual tradition; and the beat of spoken word and hip-hop. 100 Days is a collection of poetry that will stop you in your tracks. Foreword by Cecily Nicholson. It was the earth that betrayed us first it was the earth that held onto its beauty compelling us to return it was the breezes that were there & then not there it was the sun that rose & fell rose & fell as if there was nothing different as if nothing changedTrade Review"Bitek’s ability to connect with the beauty and pain of human suffering seems supernatural, this ability to give voice to those who seem to have no voices. Bitek wrote this book with her blood and it shows.... Bitek is a gifted seer, she sees tomorrow with a sweet but earthy, guttural voice, voice of the masquerade.... [Bitek] takes the reader to places in the heart that the writer never intended or imagined. That is powerful, how she makes 100 Days a deeply personal journey to each reader." [Full post at http://xokigbo.com/2016/02/28/juliane-okot-bitek-100-days-of-hells-anomie/] -- Ikhide R. Ikheloa, * Reading and Writing... Loudly, *Bitek’s poems are fierce, directly straightforward and unrelenting, composing her poems in an unadorned manner that increase in tension through the accumulation.... Part of what makes the collection so engaging is in the way she focuses on intimate spaces and details, refusing to utilize the form for a simple re-telling of history (which, frustratingly, so many poets tend to do) but engaging the smaller moments. The witness here is personal and deeply felt, even when she writes on large abstracts, proclaiming in broad gestures, exploring through the lyric a human tragedy so brutal and extensive that it becomes unfathomable." [Full post at http://robmclennan.blogspot.ca/2016/03/juliane-okot-bitek-100-days.html] -- rob mclennan"The 'Hundred Days' from April to July 1994 witnessed one of the great genocides of the twentieth century and all while the world looked on and did nothing..... The poetry of Juliane Okot Bitek takes you through its villages and churches and lost innocence, relationships where time was measured out in machete strokes and words that made light of indifference and nothing to tie it to but days and the chattering of birds and bayonet sticks and the awful brutality of it all. There are no epiphanies here, no wise men to make sense of it, no Christian sacrifice or saviours, only the memories and a poet who wrote them out for one hundred days lest we forget." Full post at http://thetarapoetryblog.blogspot.ca/2016/06/100-days-juliane-okot-bitek.html"[H]ow could an event so terrible birth a myriad of powerful words so beautiful in their execution... 100 Days is a deserving tribute to a time when humanity forgot what it meant to be human. Reading the poetry collection is a humbling experience." [Full review at http://bit.ly/2bjmR6r] -- Sydney Mugerwa * Writivism *"The poems... engage traumatised personal memory, suspect the objectivity of official discourse and explore the complications involved in forging a new future. This collection, therefore, does not only add to the ever-growing library of contemporary African poetry, but it does so in ways that will further the postcolonial conversations around nationhood, security and interethnic conflicts as they cross paths with ideas of autochthony, place, displacement and ecological interests in twenty-first century Africa." [Full review at http://bit.ly/2fbrmAN] -- Douglas E. Kazé * Transnational Literature *'"In 100 days, Juliane Okot Bitek recorded the lingering nightmare of the Rwandan genocide..." [http://whatsonafrica.org/woa-25-top-african-literature-releases-2016/?platform=hootsuite]"Bitek’s absolutely-must-read 100 Days, [is] an astonishing debut poetry collection.... Pieces are stark and plangent with simple concrete imagery and sensory detail.... The book furthers the sense of relentlessness never-ending, one day as horror-filled as the one before or the next. The University of Alberta Press has produced a tall, beautiful book.... While specific, the book’s range is far-reaching." Canadian Literature, Spring/Summer 2016 [Full review at http://canlit.ca/article/space-in-absence/] -- Crystal Hurdle * Canadian Literature *"Juliane Okot Bitek is a memory keeper, and the memories she wishes to preserve in her majestic collection of poetry, "100 Days", are of the collapse of the imagination that was the 1994 Rwandan genocide.... What makes this collection such a pleasure to read is that it’s laced with moments of such grace that you have to pause and re-read the lines again in order to reflect upon each phrase.... "100 Days” is a masterpiece of uncommon splendour and Juliane Okot Bitek is a virtuoso performing at the height of her powers." [Full review at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/59d333e1e4b043b4fb095c22] -- Diriye Osman * Huffington Post *"Juliane Okot Bitek's poetry tells it like it is no matter how difficult these truths may be to absorb. In 100 Days Bitek holds you in place by the shoulders and paints a vivid picture of genocide, terror, and yet does so through hymn, music, and rhythm." [Full article at https://roommagazine.com/blog/50-books-written-50-canadian-women-colour] -- Room Magazine * Chelene Knight *"In 100 Days, poet Juliane Okot Bitek set out to memorialize the tragedy of the Rwandan genocide, but the witnessing force of these brief, incantatory poems ripples outward to figuratively encompass multiple histories of violence and brutality, including the terror her own family and countless others faced under Idi Amin’s regime in Uganda. The lyric beauty, intertextual depth, and metonymic power of Okot Bitek’s poetry underscores the capacities of of art and language to cast light into the darkest corners of our human experience, and bridge the gulfs that lie between us.” John Keene, Award-winning writer and scholar [Full release at http://africanpoetrybf.unl.edu/?p=4321] -- John Keene“Bitek’s absolutely-must-read 100 Days [is] an astonishing debut poetry collection…. Pieces are stark and plangent with simple concrete imagery and sensory detail…. A first-person narrator, sometimes plural, adopts varying roles of spouse, parent, sibling, witness, survivor, interrogator, with each story sadder and more haunting than the next…. Will moving backward from “Day 100” (disturbing) bring closure or a sense of a beginning? The book furthers the sense of relentlessness never-ending, one day as horror-filled as the one before or the next…. While specific, the book’s range is far-reaching. The simple image of the cut flowers at commemoration, ‘all dead from the moment they were cut . . . just like the children,’ haunts.” -- Crystal Hurdle * Canadian Literature *"As the poems work themselves back to the origin of the first day, time confuses itself, is misrecognized.... Given the subject of "100 Days"—the Rwandan Genocide—history’s unreliability questions memory’s ability, as Okot Bitek explores the stakes of storytelling, witnessing, and claims of innocence. Memory elaborates its own confusion, weaving among the personal past, the intimate present, collective recollection, and human responsibility." Jami Macarty & Nicholas Hauck, The Maynard, Full review at http://www.themaynard.org/views/julianeokotbitek0217.php * The Maynard *"Speaking of and to humanity in raw, beautiful, moving words and rhythms about immense pain, the tragedy of what can be lost, including humanity itself, 100 Days appeals to the sapient, sentient, social side of human nature.... [I]f you want to be more human in the best sense, read this book. Think about it. Feel it. As a matter of urgency." [Full review at https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/05/08/still-alive-still-life/] -- Julie Wark * Counterpunch *
£16.14
University of Alberta Press Sleeping in Tall Grass
Book Synopsis"My emptiness will not be frenetic with the friction of my father's silences but still as the unmarked graves of his many forgotten selves" —From "Salt" A cycle of poems, Sleeping in Tall Grass takes an unsparing look at a painful, sometimes abusive, yet strangely redemptive family story enfolded within the body of the Canadian prairie itself—at once physical, historical, and metaphysical. These intensely personal poems reflect the complex relationships between sound and space, language and silence. Treating time as more layered than sequential, they reflect a process of organic composition distilled from Therrien's iterative observations and utterances. This is writing that reaches "into the very grain of existence"—a sonorous re-presentation of the human presence on the dispassionate but eternally giving plains.Trade Review"'Sleeping in Tall Grass' is an outstanding first poetry collection.... In the opening long poem, 'Nowhere in Sight,' Therrien uses the physical experience of walking across the prairie as a metaphor for poetry while a walking rhythm sparks spiritual insight.... Sleeping in Tall Grass is a wise book, erudite and philosophical at times but foremost a spiritual and redemptive work." Volume 15, Issue 1 [Full review at http://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose/vol15/iss1/17] -- Gillian Harding-Russell * The Goose *"It's a complex and multi-layered book, offering poems that are rooted in the prairie landscape, featuring a multitude of voices that speak to the familial, the historical, the philosophical and the mystical. Many of the poems are dark, weighted and at times exquisitely painful.... The personal stories he deconstructs show how the speaker submits, turns back to the land that begat him, until he sleeps in tall grass, until readers hear in 'Envoy,' the final poem, 'a voice singing of its own forgetting.'" -- Anne Sorbie * Alberta Views *"I appreciate Richard Therrien’s Sleeping in Tall Grass for its vulnerability, its intimate explorations of personal histories, family struggles, and the inevitability of both life and death. He offers vivid scenes, rich with feeling and emotional maturity, that give the reader powerful glimpses into the poet’s eye.... [H]is colourful treatment of the prairies captures sounds and sights with exactness; I could imagine Therrien in every scene, present on every page." Canadian Literature 234 (Autumn 2017) [Full review at http://canlit.ca/article/lyric-intimacy-in-contemporary-canadian-poetry] -- Jeffrey Aaron WeingartenTable of Contentsi Nowhere in Sight Salt ii Water, Language, Faith iii Sleeping in Tall Grass About a Mile from the Lake iv Burning Oak v I Can’t Remember the Weekend Exactly vi Living on Air Heavenly Men Envoy Notes Acknowledgements
£16.14
University of Alberta Press Believing is not the same as Being Saved
Book SynopsisLisa Martin’s new poetry collection seeks the kind of lyric truth that lives in paradox, in the dwelling together of seeming opposites such as life and death, love and loss, faith and doubt, joy and sorrow. Here readers will find a range of moods, tones, and subjects, as well as both traditional and contemporary forms—from sonnets to prose poems. This is a collection imbued with the light of an enduring, if troubled, faith. With its focus on spirit, ethics, and how to live well, Believing is not the same as Being Saved offers a tender meditation on the moments that make a life. There’s a way of speaking as if the difference matters, as if the road home is finite—everything begins and ends somewhere, like your hand in mine, or how last light fractures in the limbs of pine—while beyond my window, a coyote follows a trail into the dusk that only it can see. — from "Map for the road home"Trade Review# 1 on Edmonton Fiction Bestsellers list, April 02, 2017 * Edmonton Bestsellers *# 4 on Edmonton Fiction Bestsellers list, April 23, 2017"Believing is not the same as Being Saved" is a quietly elegant book of poems.... You can see and feel the meticulous care Martin has taken in crafting these poems, constructing this book.... Martin understands that much of life is a paradox, that joy and sorrow are birds dancing on the same high wire." (Full review at http://michaeldennispoet.blogspot.ca/2017/06/believing-is-not-same-as-being-saved.html) -- Michael Dennis * Today's Book of Poetry *'[This] is an intricate collection of poems that meditates on pivotal traumatic events in the speaker’s life that challenge her faith.... In language that turns in and out of itself in finely tuned poetic phrasing, Martin deftly manages a vision that embraces death and loss as the other side of life and love and what matters most to us.... With poems that carry a religious and philosophic fervour—whose parallel in literary tradition might be Gerard Manley Hopkins with his rapturous sonnets that delve into his own faith and doubt about God – Martin’s verses are embedded with incandescent images from the natural world and are sinuous with thought riddled with paradox." The Goose, Vol. 16, Iss. 1 [2017] [Full review at http://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose/vol16/iss1/10/] -- Gillian Harding-Russell"Lisa Martin's "Believing is not the same as Being Saved" cleaves even closer to the holy, keeping religious motifs so near her natural language that they slip in unnoticed until they start to pile up, as in the various uses of the sword 'saved' in the title poem. Martin's best poems have a knack for reaching epiphanies by assiduously focusing and unfocusing their gaze.... Martin takes seriously the need to navigate between the philosophical and material worlds. " -- Jacob McArthur Mooney * Quill & Quire *# 8 on Edmonton Fiction Bestsellers list, May 06, 2018"... a careful examination of grief, change and the lines between things. Throughout the collection, Martin’s speaker is deeply attuned to the mutability of the world. Images blend, timelines shift, and everything changes.... Martin urgently carries life and death to the reader, not to provide answers or antidotes, but to do the important work of showing us the rawness of living in a world where good things end." [Full review at http://www.prairiefire.ca/believing-is-not-the-same-as-being-saved-by-lisa-martin] -- Noah Cain * Prairie Fire *# 5 on Edmonton's Bestselling Books list; Poetry, March 1, 2020 * Edmonton's Bestselling Books *#5 on Edmonton's Bestselling Books list; Poetry, January 3, 2021# 9 on Edmonton Poetry Bestsellers list, May 9, 2021# 9 on Edmonton Poetry Bestsellers list, August 8, 2021# 6 on Edmonton Poetry Bestsellers list, July 3, 2022Table of Contents1 Believing is not the same as being saved I 5 One hundred ways to build the world 6 One thing 7 Firsts and lasts 8 Pool 9 Map for the road home 10 Memorial at Horseshoe Lake 11 The Ascension 12 Perspective 13 Sonnet for what we resolve into— 14 A solstice is an astronomical event 15 Story 16 Return 17 River 18 Bill of Rights 19 Singing in the spirit 20 The song of the spirit drawing near to the body 21 A small sigh, a hard thought, enters 22 Individualism 23 Bearings 24 Survival and all other possibles 26 If we understand the laws at all 27 Still life with white roses 28 Easter at the zoo for agnostics 30 Learning to speak and not to speak 31 Things I can and cannot do 32 Preserve of the useful 33 Sonnet for the distance between us 34 Lightening up 35 Birth weight 37 Lessening 38 Stories are for transforming ourselves 40 Some of what we know about airports in the 21st century 42 Vanity 44 Conversions 46 What I believe now about us then II51 Dog years 52 The opposite of the heart 53 Expiration 55 Separated 57 I-Thou 59 Adultery 60 Argument 61 On being in love 62 Fidelity 64 Weeping birch 65 Theology 66 Biology 67 The fine thinking 69 Heart 70 Friendship 72 Sonnet to myself and a stranger 73 Incandescent light 75 Elegy 78 Ecstasis 83 Circles 84 Dancing the path to understanding 85 Breathing in the northern forest 87 Acknowledgements
£16.14
University of Alberta Press Little Wildheart
Book SynopsisBy turns quirky, startling, earthy, and hope-filled, Micheline Maylor’s poems slip effortlessly through topics ranging from what we give up as we age to regrets for love that has passed, the interplay between the animal world and human thought, and the myths we append to ourselves and others. An expansive, conversational voice underscores the poet’s technical mastery as her subjects turn from love to hope to fearlessness. Maylor asks readers to perceive how we inhabit our selves, how words construct us. Little Wildheart is rich with challenge and surprise. I check the box on the government forms: Caucasian. No box for colonized, for the 1/16th bred. Just the double helix of my DNA, my ability to sun-brown, and my own green-eyed children of the voyageur, river visions still caught in their irises. We’re born out of a long ago season. Everyone is sure of place and race. Blood and semen mixed in dirt and cervix, convex and enchanted by muskrat’s eerie smile, dark truth furred and matted, stroked by a river paddle. Let that long tooth bite now in the land of the race riots, negro, and redskin, the underground railroad, and the Indian village. Let the name Pontiac take new form and hit the road, the righteous mile where judgement and boundary blurs, especially on matters of composition blood, bone, and relations. —from “Detroit Zoo bathroom 1977”Trade Review# 3 on Edmonton Fiction Bestsellers list, April 23, 2017"In Little Wildheart, Micheline Maylor writes poems that chart the vagaries of love, its cycles of loss and renewal, followed by a realization about the joy and freedom in reinhabiting the self without outside commitment.... Maylor draws images from an elementary and animal world to reflect the psyche and its spiritual progress. Allusive and elusive, educated and down-to-earth, witty and conversational, these oftentimes rollicking poems are fine-tuned with technical skill and strict formalist measures." (Full review at http://www.prairiefire.ca/little-wildheart-micheline-maylor/?cn=bWVudGlvbg%3D%3D) -- Gillian Harding-Russell * Prairie Fire *"... this and other poems are most memorable for how Maylor varies phrases to lure and surprise her reader. If Maylor is playing with the conventions of the lyric sentence, she's playing with the conventions of poetry itself in the book's formal pieces... Little Wildheart is a complicated book of deceptively simple parts." -- Jacob McArthur Mooney * Quill & Quire *"... fuses the personal and visceral to the mythological and metaphysical. In turns surprising and affective, Maylor’s collection presents a bodily, sensory intervention at the intersection between human and animal, intellectual and ephemeral.... [S]he examines, even blueprints, the terrain of human fear, desire, apathy, confusion, elation, and release through unexpected and generative associations. Poems...showcase Maylor’s imaginative capacity and draw in the reader with maddening ferocity—we stand at the edge of the abyss that Maylor invokes alongside the speaker.... Her diction is dense yet comprehensible and is well suited to both the casual reader of poetry and those seeking a linguistic challenge.... [N]uanced and masterful poetic technique." Canadian Literature 234 (Autumn 2017) [Full review at http://canlit.ca/article/humanmythos] -- Emily BednarzTable of Contents1 We are entirely flammable 2 Autobiography 3 Convergence 4 The lovers 5 Dissilience 6 Ten 8 In Saskatchewan, surrealism invades the silence 9 Rewind 11 Rust 12 Conscientious objectors 13 Polarity 14 Before the dark 15 Morning on the old reserve 16 Detroit Zoo bathroom 1977 17 Legend/agenda 18 Prayer of the agnostic 19 Constitution 20 Oh, by the way 21 Unrequited 22 Red sky at morning 23 The narrative 24 Three dogs and an old man 25 Almanac of the Douglas fir 26 Cormorants 27 Le deluge 28 For there are still such mysteries, and such advice 30 Consecrated grounds 31 Rapid eye movement 32 Ooh nom 34 About suffering 35 If you 36 No snow falls 37 Pupil 38 How to be in a garden 40 Fleece 41 Thorn apples 42 Dust 43 Another day of feminist perspective 44 Relativity 45 Reasons for learning cursive 46 I always wanted a tattoo 48 Of appreciation 49 Self portrait at 2:45 am 50 Firewall 51 Inclement 52 Dive 53 Evacuation 54 Mercurial 55 Citizenship of the broken heart 56 Fear of water 57 The chosen 58 Let free 59 Ordinary days 60 Drop of doom 62 There is no place that does not see you 63 Between the trees 64 Talisman pool 65 I’ve forgotten more than I knew 66 Free 67 Benediction 68 I bet you already knew 71 Acknowledgements
£16.14
University of Alberta Press Listen. If
Book Synopsisfirst snow falling slow hangs in the air a curtain drifting there thickening sight —“Winter” In this new collection, Douglas Barbour experiments with what he calls “rhythmically intense open form.” Listen. If presents technically innovative poetry that invites the reader to join in some serious play. Barbour’s vivid, ekphrastic poems engage an ongoing conversation among artworks—not only classic paintings but also popular music—while his lyric poems astutely, accessibly evoke places, moments, and feelings. This is poetry that takes up language both as the already-said and as a playground for brilliant technique. Leaping from love to landscapes, politics to jazz, Keats to Milne to Monk, these poems yearn to be spoken aloud for the pure joy of sound.Trade Review"In Barbour’s latest, there are some elements familiar through much of his work, from meditations to memorials, his ongoing engagements with world politics, and lines and narrative-threads composed with breaks of breath in and among.... There is a precision that Barbour writes out in each short breath-take, clipped and clear, even as the accumulation of those words and phrases come together to form a narrative both distinct and nebulous." [Full post at http://robmclennan.blogspot.ca/2017/04/douglas-barbour-listen-if.html] -- rob mclennan# 8 on Edmonton Fiction Bestsellers list, April 23, 2017Listen. If is Douglas Barbour’s first book of poetry in over a decade and includes work that was produced over a twenty year period. That extended period of production has some interesting effects on the text.... The past becomes an ironic counterpoint to the present, a space where the concerns of the present are revealed not necessarily to be a repetition of the past so much as a series of re-iterations altered by task of memory. Lis]en. If is a book about memory and remembering. It is reflective and reflexive, a collection marked by meditation. The objects of meditation which include the seasons, love, art, jazz recordings, and memory shift throughout the book, but serve to ground the reader’s experiences in instances and talismans of remembering.... [W]orth reading.' Prairie Fire, May 30, 2018 [Full review at http://www.prairiefire.ca/listen-if-by-douglas-barbour] -- Ryan J. CoxTable of Contents1 Acts of Memory 13 Seasonals 31 The Age Demanding 45 It’s over is it over 57 Trans — 79 Look. If 97 floating head songs 109 Recording Dates 127 A Flame on the Spanish Stairs
£16.14
University of Alberta Press Welcome to the Anthropocene
Book SynopsisAlice Major observes the comedy and the tragedy of this human-dominated moment on Earth. Major’s most persistent question—“Where do we fit in the universe?”—is made more urgent by the ecological calamity of human-driven climate change. Her poetry leads us to question human hierarchies, loyalties, and consciousness, and challenges us to find some humility in our overblown sense of our cosmic significance. Now, welcome to the Anthropocene you battered, tilting globe. Still you gleam, a blue pearl on the necklace of the planets. This home. Clouds, oceans, life forms span it from pole to pole, within a peel of air as thin as lace lapped round an apple. Fair and fragile bounded sphere, yet strangely tough— this world that life could never love enough. And yet its loving-care has been entrusted to a feckless species, more invested in the partial, while the total goes unnoticed. — from “Welcome to the Anthropocene”Trade Review"Because the universe is big and all but incomprehensible, the average Jills and Joes don’t dare ask too many existential questions. It is left to poets to face the truth in those places the rest of us fear to tread. The author of eleven books of poetry and essays, Edmonton’s first poet laureate, and a woman comfortable in the realms of math, science, and cosmology, Alice Major is uniquely qualified to guide humanity through perilous ecological times. Thank you, Alice." * Foreword Magazine *# 1 on Edmonton Fiction Bestsellers list, March 11, 2018# 10 on Edmonton Fiction Bestsellers list, March 18, 2018"Alice Major begins "Welcome to the Anthropocene" by considering all the ways humans have meddled with the environment... The traditional and experimental forms which appear throughout the book reinforce Major's argument...and hint at unseen evolutionary forces at work; rhyming couplets which make up the first poem call to mind the 'base pairs' of DNA, even as they echo Pope's 'An Essay on Man.'... She excels at depicting situations when humans are themselves little more than kind animals, unusually intelligent but never quite intelligent enough, and often confounded by their own place in the ecosphere. -- Patrick O'Reilly * Maisonneuve, Winter 2017 *“Poets work like naturalists or scientists. What they do is based on what has gone before. Alexander Pope wrote Essay on Man, one of the most quoted poems in the English language, in the 18th century… This collection is written in Alberta, in the 21st century. Its title poem, “Welcome to the Anthropocene”, has the same metre and rhyme scheme, and uses Pope’s poem as a platform for a survey of the world the poet sees.… There are a number of other fine poems, of varying lengths, touching a lot of subjects, with influences that seem to range from Gerard Manley Hopkins to a Peterson Field Guide.… The poems are serious, but the reader can expect to have fun reading them.” [Full review at http://canadianfieldnaturalist.ca/index.php/cfn/article/view/2087/1968] -- Murray Citron * The Canadian Field-Naturalist, vol. 131, no.4 *"There are poems about the workaday world, a poem written in the voice of a mouse, a poem about missing the Muse's house call because the poet—damn hygiene!—was in the shower." -- Bruce Whiteman"Alice Major is that rarest of beings, a poet whose imagination is fired by science and mathematics.... [W]ith her broad range of sympathies and wide-ranging curiosity we have a sense of inclusiveness rare in contemporary poetry (which often prefers to live in a world of its own), and a comprehensive vision not afraid of dealing with public issues.... This is poetry with a brain as well as a heart--it not only makes us feel but also succeeds in making us think." [Full review at http://londongrip.co.uk/2018/08/london-grip-poetry-review-alice-major/] -- Roger Caldwell * London Grip Poetry Review *"Welcome to the Anthropocene is a virtuosic, challenging book of poetry by Alice Major. This collection is by turns a lament, a dirge and a celebration of being on earth in this human-dominated moment.... It is a compelling book of tightly wrought, deeply skilled verse that contains within it the seeds of hope.... Major's ecologically minded poems demonstrate anew why poetry and art play leading roles in helping us to conceive of better times that are yet to come." -- Kit Dobson * Alberta Views *"...Alice Major writes an ambitious work that addresses many of the issues besetting our times...[T]he collection is an intelligent work that presents and argues and wins us over in stunning metaphors and catchy measures reinforced by couplets..." [Full review at https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose/vol17/iss1/24] -- Gillian Harding-Russell * The Goose *"In Welcome to the Anthropocene, Major is not offering a guide to action so much as a guide to broadening the problem beyond the sometimes pat suggestions of political and environmental activists.... What Major adds here is the duality of the Anthropocene: our despair in the face of it and the fact that whether we avoid, protest, reform, or embrace this new world, we are still in it." [Full review at https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/great-chain-alice-majors-welcome-anthropocene/#!] -- Hannah Rogers * LA Review of Books *"[A] confrontational yet compassionate collection of 57 poems that cut through the fluff of everyday life.... It takes courage to criticize this human-dominated planet, and compassion to remain accepting of humanity despite our collective faults. In place of answers to the questions that drive Major's poetry, she offers insight—and the insights she uncovers make Welcome to the Anthropocene deeply engaging, and wholly human." -- Megan Nega * Freefall Magazine *"...(the book’s title [Welcome to the Anthropocene] is a reference to the current geologic age, the one in which human activity is the dominant influence on the Earth’s physical environment). [Alice Major’s] work, art that reckons with science, is part of a long tradition." -- Megan Garber * The Atlantic *"This wide-ranging and beautiful collection combines scientific knowledge of evolution, DNA, and mathematical formulas with a caring attention to the wondrous connections between human and non-human life." Canadian Literature, October 5, 2018 [Full review at http://canlit.ca/article/environmental-metamorphoses] -- Kait Pinder"Each section contains smaller poems on a wide variety of topics––like local ecology, office life, mathematics, community, the domestic sphere, time, cognitive illusions, and more. Though varied in subject, so many of these poems bring us back to the problem of being human; that is, we place ourselves at the centre and see the world around us through a distorted lens." -- Jenny Haysom"Welcome to the Anthropocene is a real achievement.... [These] poems are intelligent, philosophically and ethically searching, formally engaging, and dappled with precise information and detail..." -- Edward A. Dougherty"Welcome to the Anthropocene is a poet’s take on the climate crisis, which blends math and science with poetry to produce a beautiful and wondrous examination of the natural world and humanity’s devastating impact on it. While such an undertaking could easily be defeatist, Major’s collection retains a sense of hope and genuine love for humanity that makes her poetry a refreshing read in an era plagued by eco-anxiety and negative climate news." -- Katherine DeCoste# 8 on Edmonton's Bestselling Books list; Poetry, December 01, 2019"Major is a keen observer of the river and natural environment around her hometown of Edmonton and the way it is changing as a result of climate disruption. She has the dual ability to engage us in this particular locale as well as transport us to a universal place where we can examine the bigger questions of our time..." [Full article at https://artistsandclimatechange.com/2020/02/25/welcome-to-the-anthropocene/] -- Susan Hoffman Fishman * Artists and Climate Change *# 8 on Edmonton Poetry Bestsellers list, February 14, 2021“Welcome to the Anthropocene is airy but tight … Major [is] someone who is unimpressed by the conforming type of self-satisfied nonconformist but who values the truly different, those who take an oblique angle on things.” -- Andrew DuBois * University of Toronto Quarterly, Summer 2020 *# 7 on Edmonton Poetry Bestsellers list, June 19, 2022#5 on the Edmonton Poetry Bestsellers list, April 30, 2023Table of ContentsPrologue -In medias res Welcome to the Anthropocene -Welcome to the Anthropocene -The local globe -Windfall advisory -There goes the neighbourhood -Guardians of Eden -Privacy acts -Bird singularities -Dust to dust -Annual grains -Demeter waits at the arrivals gate -Red sky at … -Climate change debate -Badger -Mouse dreams -Ratatoskr -Waltz, wasp A working world -Office hours -I heard the bells … -Staff Christmas lunch -Free time -Receptionist -Bell curve -The Gambler’s Fallacy -After a morning spent in a visioning session with a well-paid consultant -Among the Magi Long division -Catena -Zero divided by zero -Complex number plane -Discounted annuals -Draft of a poem on ‘inclusion’ Discounted annuals -The hat -The realms of asphodel -Kind to a cat -Child care -Old Anna -The things we drag behind us Laundry hearts -This afternoon before the clocks turn back -In memoriam -Battle River country -Season of metal -Laundry hearts -Within, without -In every tongue -Threshold -Sun thread -Foil -Circadian Arcadias The poet’s handbook of cognitive illusions -Hallucinating the muse -Pronominal -Pathetic fallacy -Pareidolia -The Texas sharpshooter fallacy -Necker cube illusion -Confabulation -The League of Poets Burial Society Epilogue -Cledonism Notes Acknowledgements
£16.14
University of Alberta Press To float, to drown, to close up, to open
Book SynopsisIn this collection, E. Alex Pierce enters the territory of memory embedded in landscape where “language tied to the land” evokes the cadence of tidal rivers and creates a fluid world. She traces the fragmented childhood beginnings that lead to the formation of a young artist who moves from music, through theatre, to poetry. The passionate relationships and complex juxtapositions of art and performance that form an artist’s life find voice here in the symphonic structure of the long poem, the provocative individual prose poems, and the final stretched sonnet sequence that interrogates a lost love, “Still. Shimmering in the morning wind. And gone.” These fiercely poised works are layered and rich, with sensuous attention to line and breath: a major work from an accomplished poet. And in that space of summer afternoon, the image born of sound and light inhabits all her blood and bone, the mind ignites. She sees the fire – space for her is stage now, theatre is the flame. She sees it burning all the way back to the Sable River, the lamp, the voices, the two old people, in the dark, without wall or roof or post or beam – and even as her father buries refuse in the cellar hole, turns all this under, she seizes it, picks up her torch, and runs. —from the title poemTrade Review“Pierce creates movements in the rhythm of the estuary of Sable River, where she grew up, opening, closing up, floating and drowning as consistently as moon directs the tides…. Hers is a poetry of attentiveness, reaching back through the years and into the future without sentimentality…” [Full review at https://freefallmagazine.wordpress.com/2020/09/14/review-of-e-alex-pierces-to-float-to-drown-to-close-up-to-open/] -- Joan Shillington * Freefall Magazine *Table of ContentsTo float, to drown, to close up, to open – a throat 3 To float, to drown… 19 Full Moon 22 The boy. The boy is her beloved. 23 Medway River, Carousel 25 Nothing more lonely 26 The Creek MĪthan, to conceal 31 A Dug Well 32 Tempest 33 The sky full of empty rooms 35 Bach Prelude: Reprise 36 Mīthan 37 Not wanting it to end 39 The fetch of the wind 40 It is in me forever 41 Vindauga The Stanzas. Rooms. 44 You want to say the word chemise 47 It could have been that morning 48 The opening, the newness, as if it were now 49 In an afternoon, at your house 50 Not of you. Of the capturing 51 Now, on YouTube, the camera 52 Heat from the photo lamps 53 Enraptured. Christmas morning at your house 54 The two Polish chairs 55 I can still see you, us. Side by side at Logan Airport 56 Every Sunday morning we would set off 57 Something about the dark 58 What were they doing 59 Honey and locusts. A man in pain 60 In this last hour 61 The vulnerability that doesn’t show 62 Should I tell you now 63 Or have we lived it 64 It’s not the heart. It’s the cry 65 Lento assai, cantante e tranquillo 66 We’ve come so far 67 The boards are bare Coda, Aubade. 71 The way white lilacs 73 Notes 83 Acknowledgements
£15.19
University of Alberta Press Ghosts Still Linger
Book SynopsisIn the arena, she shot cigarettes and coins from her trusting husband’s hand. Some women wished she would miss. —from “Little Sure Shot” Kat Cameron’s poetry illuminates the unsung perspectives of the women of the West, creating a compelling narrative that reflects the poet’s own struggles with sorrow. She conjures ghosts and weaves together insights on loss, memory, and the impacts of boom and bust.Trade Review"[Cameron elucidates] aspects of living in Alberta: the boom-bust madnesses, the burns and floods, the Timmy Ho rednecks, the city scavengers and the sweet cricket fields.... Cameron’s poems simmer with a quiet ire amid their gentle songs." [Full review at https://crowgirl11.wordpress.com/2020/03/25/kat-camerons-ghosts-still-linger-u-of-a-press-and-kim-goldbergs-devolution-caitlin-press/] -- Catherine Owen * Marrow Reviews *"The historical West was lawless and degenerate.... Kat Cameron is haunted by the experiences of those least among us, commoners of the Western prairies, especially women, and her searing work will not let us forget their grief." -- Matt Sutherland, Foreword Magazine, July / August 2020"From prairie history to cultural considerations such as the Edmonton Oilers and Alberta bumper stickers, Cameron’s poems examine what occurs when life gets caught up against external forces, attempting to articulate the ghosts of what has been lost, and what may have been set aside, writing out a confluence of women from Alberta to Wyoming, through boom and bust, through hope and loss and sadness and grief. These are characters that fight to remain standing, something that, at times, is either all or more than they are capable of." [Full review at https://robmclennan.blogspot.com/2020/08/kit-cameron-ghosts-still-linger.html] -- rob mclennanTable of ContentsGHOSTS ARE ORDINARY 2 Cracked 3 Blue Scarf 4 B-Flat Minor 5 Lament 6 Haunted 12 For Gerda, on the threshold 14 Paper Chambers 15 Windows of Faith 16 Bastille Day 2016 17 The King in the Car Park 19 A Diary ALBERTA ADVANTAGE 22 Athabasca Glacier 1924 24 Big Burn 25 Copper Moon 26 Drought 27 Elms 28 Flood Erasures 2013 29 Garden 30 Hinton 2013 31 Interlude 32 Johnston Canyon 33 K-Country 34 Loons and Wolf Willows 36 Moose Photobomb 37 Old North Trail 39 Oilers Nation 40 Poetic Licence 41 Prairie Fields 42 Rollerblades 43 Saturday Night Prowl 44 Territory 45 Until Help Arrives 46 VW Ramblings 47 Whyte Avenue 2 a.m. 48 YEG/YYC LIGHTNING OVER WYOMING 50 Man of the West 51 Louisa’s Locket 52 Taken 53 White Shoes 54 Woman in White 55 Testimony 58 Soiled Doves 60 Little Sure Shot 62 Glass Targets in a Museum 63 Annie’s Gun 64 Lightning over Wyoming 69 Notes 73 Acknowledgements
£15.19
University of Alberta Press I Am Still Your Negro: An Homage to James Baldwin
Book SynopsisSocial Justice Poetry Spoken-word poet Valerie Mason-John unsettles readers with potent images of ongoing trauma from slavery and colonization. Her narratives range from the beginnings of the African Diaspora to the story of a stowaway on the Windrush, from racism and sexism in Trump’s America to the wide impact of the Me Too movement. Stories of entrapment, sexual assault, addictive behaviours, and rave culture are told and contrasted to the strengthening and forthright voice of Yaata, Supreme Being. I Am Still Your Negro is truth that needs to be told, re-told, and remembered. Foreword by George Elliott Clarke. I was your Negro Captured and sold I am still your negro Arrested and killed —from “I Am Still Your Negro”Trade Review"I Am Still Your Negro takes no prisoners. With sheer brilliance, Valerie Mason-John creates poems that burn Babylon and Rome; bring you to tears; make you shout hallelujah. Her voice is that of the lamenting mother, vengeful goddess, triumphant warrior, compassionate lover, a cool ruler with a pure heart. I am left with only one conclusion about this book: it is a tour de force." -- Afua Cooper is Halifax's Poet Laureate, a global Dub poet, and Black Studies professor at Dalhousie University"I Am Still Your Negro hauls us all up by the collar to face our shared complicity. A lot of damage has been inflicted through racism, sexism, greed. Mason-John opens some wounds in the hope of healing them." -- Alice Major, author of Welcome to the Anthropocene"[T]he wide range of Mason-John’s vision ... traverses history, geography, and culture.... [Her poetry] is significant for its reappraisal of our collective past, which so often overlooks or writes over marginalized voices and experiences. [Mason-John is] explicit in calling out a hypocritical Canadian multiculturalism that pays lip service to inclusion while simultaneously entrenching systemic biases and processes that maintain a racist and exclusionary status quo." [Full review at https://quillandquire.com/review/the-response-of-weeds-a-misplacement-of-black-poetry-on-the-prairies/ ] -- Steven W. Beattie * Quill & Quire *"This poetry collection grabs you... Readers are confronted with the violence of the Black experience, from the haunting spectre of slavery to the current and ongoing terrorizing of the Black diaspora at the hands of the police. All of the messy, the painful, the enraging -- what we’re conditioned to believe as shameful -- is laid bare for the readers and brought to the fore. Many of these accounts traverse various places -- whether in the U.K., the U.S., or Canada -- and the bluntness and force of her words arrest you." [Full article at https://vancouversun.com/entertainment/books/book-review-i-am-still-your-negro-by-valerie-mason-john] -- Junie DesilIncluded on CBC Books's list of top Canadian poetry of the year in December 2020.“The topics range from slavery and colonization to global politics and historical realities, addressing the racialized and gendered intersections of African identity, diaspora, and ancestry…. Mason-John’s poetry sheds light on these harsh realities through personal and vulnerable narratives. Their writing also offers hope for our futures by reminding readers of our collective reservoir of power, resilience, and creativity. With these tools in our hands and our ancestors beside us, we may still be negros, but we ain’t silent about it no more.” [Full article at https://arrow-journal.org/language-and-personal-narrative-in-revolutionary-poetry/] -- shah noor hussein * The Arrow *Table of Contentsix Foreword George Elliott Clarke xiii ID xvii Introduction #Undocumented Back a Yard My Father’s Prayer Sticks and Stones #ThisIsAfricanDiaspora Yaata’s Lament The Ghost of Thomas Peters I Am Africa African Feet The Windrush I Am Still Your Negro Another One Bites the Dust #MeToo Yaata’s Yowl Business Golden Virginia The Villain The Perfect Road The Couplet #MeToo Playing Dead #IfMyPlantsCouldSpeak Yaata’s Groan Yellowknife The Binge The VindaLoo Anorectic #Swag Yaata’s Manifesto The Front Line Sixty Seconds Stalk Time Mothercare #RaveScene Yaata’s Rap Essentials for Heaven Cinders Time My First Half Class A #Intersectionality Yaata’s Prophecy Self Portrait 1: The Colour of My Skin Self Portrait 2: Call Me My Name Mani-Festation A Wake Forget and Pretend Again Becoming Farewell My Fiend Yaata’s Epilogue Acknowledgements
£15.19
University of Alberta Press Fields of Light and Stone
Book SynopsisYou lie awake, needlessly fingering this patchwork guilt. Remorse, a code you live by; distress calls for someone to blame. —from “Threads” Following the deaths of her Mennonite grandparents, Angeline Schellenberg began exploring their influence on her life. Her elegiac love letter to them articulates her grief against the backdrop of their involuntary emigration. She artfully captures the immigrant identity, vital to Canadian culture, in poems that draw on events both personal and global: war and famine, dementia and cancer, hidden sacrifice and secrets. Her poems captivate with themes of ancestry, memory, resilience, and forgiveness. Fields of Light and Stone is a reflection on how family history shapes and moves us.Trade Review"Schellenberg’s collection is a love letter to these four people [grandparents] whose lives were so completely intertwined with hers." Kyla Neufeld, Prairie Books Now, Spring/Summer 2020 [Full article at https://prairiebooksnow.ca/articles/view/poet-reflects-on-her-grandparents-lives-through-poetry-and-collected-letters-artifacts]“Schellenberg’s best poems don’t offer easy answers, and do a good job of letting the question lie.” -- Jonathan Ball"While most of the book’s poems are based on personal connections Schellenberg built with her grandparents over the years, she also explores topics of their ancestry, immigration, and courtship.... Some of the poems touch on the poignant theme of loss..." [Full review at https://nivervillecitizen.com/news/arts-and-entertainment/former-nivervillians-second-book-reflects-on-grandparents] -- Brenda Sawatzky"Fields of Light and Stone excavates the relationships between Schellenberg’s Mennonite grandparents….The book moves among various styles and source materials as through sheaves of distinct documents…” [Full article at https://canlit.ca/article/sinews-and-sheaves/] -- Carl Watts * Canadian Literature *“I was immediately attracted to its contents because of the illustration on the jacket (Last Embrace by Miriam Rudolph)…. Between the covers are poems that sing of love and loss…. Schellenberg’s playful use of words is evident throughout…. This book will resonate with those writing memoirs or translating old letters and will perhaps inspire others to do so. Not that long ago, I sat with the boxes of correspondence my parents had left behind after they passed away. Many of the thoughts Schellenberg expresses in her creative, poetic style went through my mind at that time and they linger still. She has left a tribute to her grandparents that will stand the test of time.” -- Elfrieda Neufeld Schroeder, Mennonite History, December 2020# 1 on Edmonton Poetry Bestsellers list, February 14, 2021“Schellenberg’s Fields of Light and Stone enacts the terms of her title with its tender and exacting invocations of familial love…. [O]ne of the delicate strengths of Schellenberg’s poems of mourning is their fresh grief at old losses…. Fields of Light and Stone has a light touch that never confuses love for denial of death, and Angeline Schellenberg finds painful beauty in the imperfections of mourning.” -- Tanis MacDonald, Journal of Mennonite Studies, 2021Table of ContentsEverything There Is to Say • ix In some reminiscent hour Love Letters, 1944–45 • 4–47 Time in Evergreen Resurrection • 7 Tokens of Mercy • 9 This Is His Body • 11 Threads • 14 Beckoning Hills • 16 Preaching to the Choir • 17 Dementia, Warm October • 18 Grandpa’s Day Timers • 21 For When You Wondered Why I Wasn’t There • 23 The Minute I Heard You Died • 25 After Eights • 26 Funeral Tape • 28 Clouds above Canola Gardening Advice from the Wife of a Pious Pastor • 33 The Autumn of Your Cancer • 35 Scavenger Hunt • 37 Between Seed and Harvest • 38 For Your Name’s Sake • 39 Closure • 42 The Night of the Fair • 44 Are you sewing, Mom? • 46 Deep Breathing • 48 What Little Things Come to Us • 49 There Is the Old Brick House • 50 Fields of Light and Stone Fields • 54 Shivered into Being In My First Five Year Diary • 57 Making Sheep • 58 Unwinding • 59 Oma’s Girl • 60 Bias Binding • 61 In Whispers He’s Still the Wanderer • 63 All Is Bright • 64 As We Left They Sang • 65 Edges • 67 Division • 69 What the Aspens Whispered Under the Shadow of Your Name • 73 He Made Me Promise to Remember Arkadak • 74 Ancient Script • 76 Generations • 77 Plans to Prosper • 78 His Hands • 79 Sunset on Deep Bay • 80 Souvenir • 81 After the Funeral, I Pick up My Box • 82 Passages • 83 The First Trees • 84 Notes • 85 Acknowledgements • 89
£15.19
University of Alberta Press This Sweet Rupture
Book SynopsisThe poems in This Sweet Rupture explore family secrets, diaspora, food culture, and war's impact on personal narratives while navigating cultural identity as a first-generation Lebanese-Canadian.
£15.19
Anvil Press Jabbering with Bing Bong
Book SynopsisKevin Spenst''s much-anticipated debut collection of poetry opens as a coming-of-age narrative of lower-middle class life in Vancouver''s suburb of Surrey, embroidered within a myriad of pop-culture and post-Mennonite. Jabbering with Bing Bong interrogates memory and makes its way into the urban energies of Vancouver. Language is at play with sit-com sonnets and soundscapes of noise; videogame goombas and an Old-Testament God; teenage longing within the power chords of heavy metal andthe complicated loss of a father to schizophrenia. Jabbering with Bing Bong, chronicles the heartbreaking and slapstick pursuit of truth in the realms of religion, mental health, and poetic form itself. The poems in Jabbering with Bing Bong are formally inventive, emotionally charged, and teeming with ideas. Belief and disbelief rub up against each other in this startling and flawless debut collection by Kevin Spenst. Jabbering with Bing Bong''s urban and suburban-scapes vibrate with a controlled hysteria; a music at turns ebullient, ribald, somber. These important poems do not redeem so much as allow the possibility of redemption: Sometimes words/mean nothing and everything. Open your mouth and see.'' (Jen Currin) In Jabbering with Bing Bong, Kevin Spenst playfully-and masterfully-confronts the preacher of the urban pastoral. For us, he gives a deserved and surreal middle finger to the comic absurdity of the evangelist. Infused with 80s pop culture, folklore, psychology, and thetransient mythos of the changing ''nonesuch'' of place and people, Spenst''s poems platform a don''t-mess-with-me feistiness and versatility. Fearless, attentively probing, and sonically sharp, he is a rare counter-theosophist rhapsodist. His poems reveal the labour of an unyielding, gentle soul. Indeed, Spenst''s Jabbering... is the work of a remarkable shepherd. (Sandra Ridley) Inside a twisted TV-to-organism takeover, Kevin Spenst provides further proof that the best writing these days is in the practice of poetry. Hang on tight as you are winged deftly through the human strains...curiosity, sexuality, death, religion and striving, it''s all here. ''Best of all you can jump towards the heavens on the trampoline in bouncing rain.'' Something for everyone: a story of Surrey as a history of traffic; family life of the scruffily psychotic; the phrenology of things that go David Lynch in the draft beer night; and gibberish too! (Dennis E. Bolen, author of Black Liquor, Anticipated Results)Charged with energy and delivered with confidence, Jabbering with Bing Bong is a compelling read. Kevin Spenst''s muscular vocabulary, vigorous pace and nimble references to cultural details enliven his exploration of topics ranging from adolescence to God to Fenris wolf. Skepticism is offset with humour and compassion, and holding it all together is grief for a dead father whose troubled life still haunts the son and informs his writing. (Sarah Klassen)
£13.29
Anvil Press Rue
Book SynopsisIn her compelling debut poetry collection, shortlisted for the Robert Kroetsch Award, Melissa Bull explores the familial, romantic, and sexual ties that bind lives to cities. Rue takes us through its alleys, parks, and kitchens with a robust lyricism and language that is at once inventive and plainspoken, compassionate and frank. In English, to rue is to regret; in French, la rue is the street Rue''s poems provide the venue for moments of both recollection and motion. Punctuated withneologisms and the bilingual dialogue of Montreal, the collection explores the author''s upbringing in the working-class neighbourhood of St. Henri with her artist mother, follows her travels, friendships, and loves across North America, Europe, and Russia, and recounts her journalist father''s struggles with terminal brain cancer. Inspired by powerful Quebec talents like Nelly Arcan, Marie-Sissy Labrèche, playwright Annick Lefebvre, Canadians poets Elizabeth Bachinsky, Nikki Reimer and David McGimpsey, Melissa Bull brings an unflinching new feminist voice to the Canadian literary scene.
£13.29
Anvil Press Further Confessions of a Small Press Racketeer
Book SynopsisFurther Confessions of a Small Press Racketeer is a continuation of the columns and essays that comprised Stuart''s 2005 release, Confessions of a Small Press Racketeer. Again, equal parts literary memoir, reckless tirade, and unsolicited advice for the aspiring writer, Further Confessions is drawn largely from Stuart Ross''s notorious Hunkamooga column, his blog entries, essays for subTerrain magazine and other online venues. We bring them together here in their collected brilliance: alternately snarky, sincere, touching, honest, and always opinionated, Stuart''s confessions are essential reading for any literary confessional. This volume offers its readers a roller-coaster journey into the mind of one of Canada''s most committed small press activists. Praise for Confessions of a Small Press Racketeer, vol. 1: Confessions of a Small Press Racketeer is a wonderful book-funny, outrageous, and acute. I''ll even say it''s the best short-essay collection about the writing life I''ve read in ages. (Lynne Van Luven, Malahat Review) For a quick and dirty breath of fresh air, it''s difficult to beat renegade urban poet Stuart Ross''s latest effort, Confessions of a Small Press Racketeer ... No reformed baby boomer or slumming trust-funder, Ross has the battle scars and knows poetry isn''t about flowers and meadows, it''s about blood and guts. (Stephen Knight, Quill & Quire) The book is a must for anyone working as a poet in Canada, with standout pieces on the politics ofwriting for free, open mic readings, poetic bitterness, chapbook and zine publishing, and the requisite but never-funnier grouch advice to young poets, salubriously titled Stop Bugging Me Already!'' (Prairie Fire) ...no pulled punches here ... this is writing that works because, as with all good confessions, it''s from the heart but comes by way of the brain. (Vancouver Review)
£13.29
Anvil Press The Revolving City: 51 Poems and the Stories
Book SynopsisFinalist for the City of Vancouver Book Award The Revolving City: 51 Poems and the Stories Behind Them is a vibrant and diverse collection from a who''s who of the west coast poetry scene. The poems assembled here range from the lyric to the experimental and address the theme of disconnection in an urban environment from a variety of positions, concerns, and cultural perspectives. The collection also includes short reflections on the poems, written by the poets themselves, providing readers with an intimate insight into the inspiration and meaning behind the poems. The Revolving City anthology evolved out of the Lunch Poems reading series, a stimulating exchange of poetic ideas and cadence held the third Wednesday of every month in public space at Simon Fraser University''s Vancouver campus. The Revolving City seeks to build community, extend poetry to new audiences, and reflect the rich diversity of the poetry scene both local and distant. Edited by much-lauded writer and director of the Writer''s Studio, Wayde Compton, and award-winning poet Renée Sarojini Saklikar. Contributors: Jordan Abel, Joanne Arnott, Elizabeth Bachinsky, Dennis E. Bolen, George Bowering, Tim Bowling, Colin Browne, Stephen Collis, Wayde Compton, Peter Culley, Jen Currin, Phinder Dulai, Daniela Elza, Mercedes Eng, Maxine Gadd, Heidi Greco, Heather Haley, Ray Hsu, Aislinn Hunter, Mariner Janes, Reg Johanson, Wanda John-Kehewin, Rahat Kurd, Sonnet L''Abbé, Fiona Tinwei Lam, Evelyn Lau, Christine Leclerc, Donato Mancini, Daphne Marlatt, Susan McCaslin, Kim Minkus, Cecily Nicholson, Billeh Nickerson, Juliane Okot Bitek, Catherine Owen, Miranda Pearson, Meredith Quartermain, Jamie Reid, Rachel Rose, Renée Sarojini Saklikar, Jordan Scott, Sandy Shreve, George Stanley, Rob Taylor, Jacqueline Turner, Fred Wah, Betsy Warland, Calvin Wharton, Rita Wong, Changming Yuan, and Daniel Zomparelli. Praise for The Revolving City: In these fiercely competitive and egotistical times, what a relief when established poets stand alongside and support emerging ones. The poems - passionate, com-passionate and critical at once, investigating, as Meredith Quartermain puts it, ''the physical, the historical, the cultural and the linguistic grounds'' of the city - are deepened by each poet''s reflection on their own work. Here are the cultural voices of Canada''s today and tomorrow. Listen. You will be hearing more. (Kate Braid, author of Turning Left to the Ladies and Rough Grounds Revisited) Plato said poets are the people least likely to be able to say anything enlightening about the craft. He was a curmudgeon for thinking that, but not entirely wrong, because good poems derive less from the intellect than from the solar plexus, the bone marrow, or what Yeats called ''the rag-and-bone shop of the heart.'' It''s so hard to write a good poem that poets leap at the chance to talk about what they were trying to achieve, or how it came to pass; and these ruminations are always more personal and often more engaging than the poems themselves. The Revolving City celebrates this wonderful dichotomy and, at times, blessedly defies it. (Gary Geddes, author of What Does a House Want? and editor of 20th-Century Poetry and Poetics) The Revolving City not only manages to emphasize the importance of breaking social divides, but it also reveals the inherently effective power poetry has in expressing issues of societal significance. (The Ubyssey)
£13.29
Anvil Press Publishers Inc Assdeep In Wonder
Book SynopsisAssdeep in Wonder is a collection of new poems that explore the idea of identity in a myriad of contexts: personal, sexual, cultural, national, literary, and poetic. The poems are raw and immediate, exploring themes of addiction, sexuality, loss, love, and wonder in equal measures. Selected Praise: "Gudgeon's first poetry collection is a quirky valentine to irreverent readers, full of stark and pretty imagery, wry quips, and glorious bursts of vulgarity. ..." (Foreword Reviews)
£13.29
Anvil Press Publishers Inc Ignite
Book SynopsisA finalist for the Alfred G. Bailey Prize, Ignite is a collection of elegiac and experimental poetry powder-kegged with questions about one man's lifelong struggle with schizophrenia. Born into a strict Mennonite family, Abe Spenst's mental illness spanned three decades in and out of mental institutions where he underwent electric shock treatment and coma-induced insulin therapy. Merging memory and medical records, Kevin Spenst recreates his father's life through a cuckoo's nest of styles that both stand as witness and waltz to the interplay between memory, emotion and all our forms of becoming. Praise for Ignite: "... with a fearless layering of voice, Ignite is upfront and unswerving. A novel-esque torrent tracing a troubling history of illness, part confrontation and part chronicle, this collection is daring with its dark narrative. Here is a willingness for, and enviable strength in, extending poetic range. Ignite heals and ascends. There are books that need to be written and this is one of them. This is a collection which gives more and more with every read." (Sandra Ridley, judge, Alfred G. Bailey prize) "An outstanding follow-up to Spenst's excellent first collection. (Winnipeg Free Press)" A selection of poems from Ignite won the Lush Triumphant Award for Poetry.
£13.29
Anvil Press Publishers Inc Serpentine Loop
Book Synopsis"Writers, like skaters, score the blank sheet and test the edge of inclusion and exclusion. Most of these poems begin with a word from skating and push off to another topic. Others revisit ideas of femininity, control and language as pattern, or visit the past through movement, or enact principles from the rink such as symmetry, joy, endurance, crescendo and accent, revolution, response. The blade melts ice via friction and pressure. I drifted away from skating but the language is imprinted in me, too, a tracing, a line extending beyond the margins." (from Serpentine Loop) These are engaging and poignant poems about life on and off the ice.
£13.29
Anvil Press Publishers Inc Bad Engine: New & Selected Poems
Book SynopsisSelected and with an Introduction by Stuart Ross Michael Dennis has been hammering his love, his anger, his grief, and his awe into poems for over forty years. With seven books and nearly twenty chapbooks to his credit, Dennis isn't exactly a household name in Canadian poetry, but he is a natural heir to poets like Canadian icon Al Purdy and American legends Eileen Myles and Charles Bukowski. His poems are his life made into poems: direct, emphatic, honest. Bad Engine brings together mostly revised versions of about one hundred poems selected from Dennis's published work, along with several dozen new poems. This volume, introduced and edited by Dennis's long-time friend, the poet and editor Stuart Ross, marks a milestone in the career of a homegrown, no-bullshit, tells-it-likes-he-sees-it populist bard. Here the reader will find a rollicking tale of drinking with racists, poignant prayers for quiet nights with lovers, raw narratives of childhood abuse, defiant anthems of a body broken by sports injuries, a mindful meditation about a stoned dragonfly, and the not-quite resigned laughter of a man smashing away at a keyboard for four decades and becoming neither rich nor famous. Bad Engine is Michael Dennis being human.
£14.39
Anvil Press Publishers Inc Escape from Wreck City
Book Synopsisda Vinci Eye Finalist, Eric Hoffer Awards. Escape from Wreck City is a debut collection of poetry from Calgary author John Creary. There are poems about nature, poems about love and relationships, poems about living in the city, and poems about traveling the world. And all at once they capture the thrill of being fully engaged with the world, keenly observing each moment and event that constitutes being human. Whether it's following the "wounded insomniac" through the "desert lushness of sage and creosote" or hot lovers who "flicker bare back beneath the full moon, panting" or drifting, moribund couples on empty streets moving like "dead meat or heavy traffic" under leaves of an "electric yellow" Creary's language is potent, lush, playful and witty, demanding of attention. Sharp with insights that cut, lancet-like, to the core of the matter, the poems in Escape from Wreck City like the people who inhabit them are ecstatically alive. Advance Praise for Escape from Wreck City: "John Creary's poems growl, roar, whisper, chortle, purr and shout. He's a writer stoned on words, constantly surprised by what they can and can't do. Language's energy-clean, dirty, pulsing, spiking, minimalist-vibrates through Escape from Wreck City." - Tom Wayman, author of The Order in Which We Do Things
£13.29
Anvil Press Publishers Inc A Temporary Stranger
Book SynopsisA Temporary Stranger is comprised of three sections: Homages, Fake Poems, and Recollections. In Homages we find poems of reverence and honour, tributes to writers who had opened up the world of poetry to Jamie. There are poems to Spicer, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Breton, Francis Ponge, Tristan Tzara and others. At the centre of A Temporary Stranger are the Fake Poems, so called because "There is no art on earth that can fully represent the exact and flowing experience of viewing stone within the flow of water and the waving light within the water and around the stone, and the subsequent sense of awe and beauty that arises in the interaction between the seer and the seen... . In that sense, all art is fake... " The third section, Recollections, is an assemblage of articles paeans, really - to Robin Blaser, bill bissett, Warren Tallman, John Newlove, Curt Lang, Nellie McClung, Artie Gold, Kim Goldberg, Kate Braid, and others. Here, as friend and editor Karl Siegler states in his Foreword, "we encounter memory-not as a form of nostalgia for a bygone golden age of a romanticised pastoral arcadia ... but as an historical record of who did what when, and to what end, throughout the counterculture revolution that shaped the lives of Jamie Reid and his companions over the past six decades."
£13.29
Anvil Press Publishers Inc The Least You Can Do Is Be Magnificent: Selected
Book SynopsisFor over thirty years, Steve Venright has devoted himself to the liberation of the imagination, documenting hallucinatory trips through Southwestern Ontario's deliriomantic landscapes with his signature puns, portmanteaus, and spoonerisms. The Least You Can Do Is Be Magnificent: Selected & New Writings is a generous gathering of Venright's most enduring and extraordinary poems, including the revised and expanded "Manta Ray Jack and the Crew of the Spooner," the most outlandish and hilarious seafaring tale since Lewis Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark. This volume also features an in-depth examination of Venright's work by scholar Alessandro Porco.
£14.39
Anvil Press Publishers Inc Slinky Naive
Book SynopsisIn this debut collection, Caroline Szpak is the grand ventriloquist, manipulating words and voices in strange and fantastical ways. Her phrases, her metaphors and similes, slam up against each other like strangers on the street. Apologies, changes in direction, barometric pressure, objects ping and ricochet, but some residual thing clings after the parting. We acknowledge, we recognize, we nod knowingly, and not just from familiarity but because her words have snapped our head forward. And we realize the dummy on her lap, frozen and smiling, is us, and the jaw drops from laughter and dismay, but just as often it drops in awe. Advance Praise for Slinky Naive: "The urban, visceral, longing-infused poems in Slinky Naive are fast, dense, and laser-focused. And when the lines are funny, and they often are, it's like laughing before the blade comes down. Caroline Szpak is doing exactly what poets should do: she is doing something no one else is doing." (Stuart Ross, author of Pockets and A Sparrow Came Down Resplendent)
£13.29
Anvil Press Publishers Inc Bolt
Book SynopsisBOLT, the debut collection from West Coast performance poet Hilary Peach, ranges over both familiar and unexplored landscapes. From a series of surreal vignettes derived from 20 years as a welder with the Boilermakers' Union, to a suite of poems based on the truths and superstitions of snakelore, to alluring, imagistic, songs of loss and longing, BOLT investigates rough terrain and long horizons. A compilation of poetry, performance scores, and autobiography, it is full of voices, places, fleeting encounters, animals, busted hearts, machinery, and extreme weather. Delicate portraits of birds muscle in on experimental scripts. Buffalo thunder through the text. Lovers are left weeping, factory stacks rear up against boiling skies, and coal trains thread silently through clouds of fugitive dust. It is a collection of scars and a compendium of remedies. BOLT is a measurement of lightening. But it's also a carefully engineered fastener that holds things together. It's the familiar impulse that occasionally seizes us all, to suddenly run, out of control.
£13.29
