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- May 2013
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Thursday May 23, 2013
Daniel MacIvor’s Cul-de-sac in Minneapolis, Minnesota -
Thursday May 23, 2013
Chief Bev Sellars’ They Called Me Number One Launch in Vancouver -
Friday May 24, 2013
Guillermo Verdeccia at Canada-U.S. Border Issues and Culture Conference, Sault. Ste. Marie -
Friday May 24, 2013
Chris Arnett Speaks at UVic on Colonial War and “Judicial Murder” in 1863 Vancouver -
Thursday May 30, 2013
Stephen Collis Launches The Red Album, Vancouver -
Friday May 31, 2013
Adeena Karasick - BookExpo America 2013 -
Friday May 31, 2013
Baba Brinkman’s Ingenious Nature in NYC - June 2013
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Saturday June 1, 2013
Baba Brinkman’s Rap Guide to Evolution in NYC -
Sunday June 2, 2013
Baba Brinkman’s Canterbury Tales Remixed in NYC -
Thursday June 6, 2013
Cecily Nicholson at 2013 Virginia Woolf Conference, Vancouver -
Thursday June 6, 2013
Kafka’s Hat Book Launch with Patrice Martin -
Friday June 7, 2013
For the Pleasure of Seeing Her Again - Michel Tremblay - Magnetic North Theatre Festival -
Tuesday June 11, 2013
Marcus Youssef’s Winners and Losers in Ottawa -
Thursday June 20, 2013
Adeena Karasick - 14th Annual Convention of The Media Ecology Association -
Thursday June 20, 2013
The 2013 Whitehorse Poetry Festival - July 2013
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Thursday July 18, 2013
The 11th Annual Denman Island Readers and Writers Festival -
Tuesday July 30, 2013
Taking Shakespeare - John Murrell - Stratford Festival -
Tuesday July 30, 2013
Taking Shakespeare - John Murrell - Stratford Festival - August 2013
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Monday August 19, 2013
KlezKanada 2013 - KlezKanada’s Poetry Retreat - Adeena Karasick and Jake Marmer -
Wednesday August 21, 2013
Marcus Youssef’s Winners and Losers at Noorderzon Festival, Netherlands - October 2013
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Tuesday October 1, 2013
The St. Leonard Chronicles - Steve Galluccio - Centaur Theatre -
Tuesday October 29, 2013
Seeds - Annabel Soutar - Centaur Theatre - November 2013
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Sunday November 10, 2013
Marcus Youssef’s Winners and Losers in Toronto -
Thursday November 21, 2013
Adeena Karasick - National Communication Association 99th Annual Convention: in the Applied Semantics and Practical Communication Across the Disciplines Session -
Tuesday November 26, 2013
Adeena Karasick - Art Bar Series
A Few Words Will Do
When one person writes “this is what happened, this is what I know,” any reader stands in for the absent “I” or “eye” of that text. This inescapable process of language, preoccupies Kearns in these brief but concentrated pieces.
After Jack
Not merely an homage to Jack Spicer, but also a tribute to his Orphic conception of the serial poem, After Jack is a palimpsestuous attempt to achieve the dark art of nekuia, to encourage the means of poetic transmission and to divine the polyphony of both Federico García Lorca and Jack Spicer as their voices interweave, transform and become inexorably entangled with a fresh and undeniably peculiar, disturbingly profane authorial voice.
All Is Flesh
All Is Flesh collects in one volume Hugh Hazelton’s English translations of Yannick Renaud’s brilliant first two books of poems, Taxidermy and The Disappearance of Ideas, first published by Éditions Les Herbes rouges in Montreal.
Amuse Bouche
Mashing up the lexicon of war with post-industrial consumerism, haute cuisine, couture, language, Eros and desire, Karasick’s sixth book is at once dark and satirical, exuberant and amorously rigorous.
Asian Skies
By Ken Norris
Composed like a dark novel-in-verse, Asian Skies is the unsettling story of the deficiencies of love that have produced our commodified and globalized world—a perhaps not-so-divine comedy of those who don’t love enough—steeped in a clash of cultures wherein the third world seems willingly, even perversely, to offer itself up as a simulacrum of the first, while its otherness remains hidden, inaccessible.
Aurora
Sharon Thesen’s poems express the pleasure and magic of a language fully engaging the world, rewarding the reader with daily moments transformed into visions of grace.
b leev abul char ak trs
By bill bissett
““Get thee to a nouneree.”“ Ophelia had been experiencing noun slippage, (and haven’t we all?) And where is the nouneree? Do you know the way? With heightened and more sophisticated noun awareness, do we come closer to happiness, starring ourselves? Ophelia unfortunately didn’t find the nouneree and perhaps thought it was the name of the river. Can you walk into the same nouneree twice? She jumped in. Lost lovesickness, now called co-dependency.
Back to the War
By Frank Davey
A careful archaeology of the catalogue of innocence assembled by a youthful imagination blossoming during World War II.
Bardy Google
By Frank Davey
These texts are part of Davey’s ongoing work on the use of the sentence as the basic structural unit of poetry—to create poetic texts, as they have always been created, out of the materials of prose. They also constitute another of his forays into cultural commentary—in this case, disclosing how our engagement with globalized culture creates meaning as it “speaks through itself.”
Blonds on Bikes
A composition of daily riffs during an autumn in Denmark and Italy; an album of verbal portraits by a husband and wife who see differently; and a series of tributes to other writers on special occasions.
bpNichol Comics
By bp Nichol
Nichol’s comics (1960–1980) informed his work in other genres as well as the work of other writers.
Bread and Salt
By Renee Rodin
Bread and _Salt_—what you bring for luck to a new house—is a joyous affirmation of vision and courage in hard times.
Breathin' My Name With a Sigh
By Fred Wah
An important and enduring long poem from the most poetical of the TISH poets.
Cartouches
The recent deaths of her father and several friends at the time of a trip to Egypt have led the author to write about the essential relation between language and death.
Change Room
The body is here fetishized by the creative power of desire to the point where the love of perfection crosses the boundaries of gender and polity.
Chinese Blue
By Weyman Chan
Here is Weyman Chan at his most fiercely ironic, tracing a lineage he interprets subconsciously and through the intricacies of its raw genetic material, with keenly biting language that echoes the rhythms of Qu Yuan in contemplation of his own mortality beside the flowing waters of impermanence:
I would prefer to jump into the river and be entombed in the stomachs of fishes than to bow while purity is defiled by vulgar pestilence.
Coping with Emotions and Otters
Combining serial poetic technique with pop psychology how-to books, Dina Del Bucchia fashions punchy emotional guides in an age when illusory autonomy is achieved by “going viral” and through obsessive identification with celebrities. She tracks two otters at the Vancouver Aquarium who became famous for holding hands and were watched by millions on YouTube prompting us to meditate upon the media frustum through which we construct emotional realities.
Cultural Mischief
By Frank Davey
A collection of prose poems on the hyperbolic absurdities of multiculturalism in action.
Davie Street Translations
To the street that is a village, Daniel Zomparelli conveys a liveliness and wit that rhetorically towel-flicks its way from the sardonic bathhouse banter of ancient Rome to the cinematic musical machismo of the poets of the San Francisco Renaissance, with each poem “translating” another chapter in his documentary of gay male culture in Vancouver, demonstrating, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde, that the young are always ready to give to those who are older than themselves the full benefits of their inexperience.
Decompositions
By Ken Belford
If language is an index of belonging, then Decompositions is the writing of an exile, a tribe of one. For Belford, poetry is a social process that explores linguistic and political particulars from a gaze that is opposite to the shelters of convention, the academy, the city, or the south. It is a writing that rules out the anticipation and doubt of traditional narrative. These are not safe poems, they resist more than they assure.
Discovery Passages
With breathtaking virtuosity, Garry Thomas Morse sets out to recover the appropriated, stolen, and scattered world of his ancestral people, retracing Captain Vancouver’s original “voyage of discovery.” and linking Kwakwaka’wakw traditions of the past with a modern poetic tradition in North America that encompasses the entire scope of relations between oral and vocal tradition, ancient ritual, historical contextuality, and our continuing rites.
Dominican Moon
By Ken Norris
Composed like a dark novel-in-verse, the second book in Norris’s travel trilogy is an unsettling story of the deficiencies of love steeped in a clash of cultures between the third world and the first.
Down Time
By Jeff Derksen
Proposes a social self that is able to recognize the ironies and restrictions we live in without returning to a garrison mentality.
Dream Pool Essays
By Gil McElroy
An active multiple streaming of apparently disparate sources: astronomy; theoretical cosmology and quantum physics; and the literary and visual arts.
Dwell
By Jeff Derksen
This long poem blends and bends the lyric, procedural poetry, the travelogue and extended forms. Dwell lives in, or dwells on, the interaction of a restless subjectivity with the seemingly transparent, yet identifiable, social codes that encase us.
Dyssemia Sleaze
Cf. SEMA, unit of meaning: i.e. Dyssemia: (flawed information reception) Sleaze / sli:z/ v. Rough with projecting fibres.
Fifty
By Ken Norris
Among its widely diverse poetic forms, the book constructs odes, elegies, sonnets and long poem sequences, as Norris travels from Maine to Santo Domingo, from Phnom Penh to Montreal, and from the shorelines of the Caribbean to the banks of the Mekong River.
Five Star Planet
This third volume in McFadden’s Terrafina Trilogy —which began with Gypsy Guitar and There’ll be Another —is shaped by a wealth of poetic forms.
Floating Up to Zero
By Ken Norris
In Floating Up to Zero, Ken Norris introduces us to “a traveller from an antique land,” though in this case that traveller’s story is not Shelley’s meditation on the vanity of ancient kings, but rather the poet’s meditation on the here and now, on the present moment, precariously balanced between a certain frozen past and an uncertain fluid future. Meditative, incisive and light in their touch, these poems tell us: “The old star charts were perhaps a little out of date. That is, new stars had since been found, though sometimes they were only streetlights, mistaken.”
fractal economies
beaulieu pushes the limits of poetry and poetics, challenging the status quo of the genre and the politics of language itself.
Genrecide
Explores through play and pun the intersection of multiple cultures, codes, idioms and constructs that have an impact on female identity.
gifts
By rob mclennan
Unifying this book is the persona of the lover: as an intimate; as an interruption of the determinative self; as an unattainable weightlessness; and as the gravitational pull of the landscape itself.
Glengarry
By rob mclennan
Composed in three sections, Glengarry is a return in writing to the landscape of rob mclennan’s youth and a headlong rush into the fractures, slippages and buried surfaces of what the text leaves undisclosed to him.
Going Home
By Ken Norris
The whole manufactured unreality of our world falls away in these poems, leading us both toward and away from being “at home” in the present.
Ground Water
By Colin Browne
Investigates the elements of the spiritual topography of the twentieth century and closely examines the conventional symbology passed on to the poet / map-maker by his ancestors.
Gypsy Guitar
One hundred poems of love and betrayal—all in the unmistakable McFadden style.
Hanging Fire
By Phyllis Webb
Astonishingly beautiful entrances into the personae of lost companions who reappear, animated by a voice in love with the music of their speaking.
harvest
By rob mclennan
What is harvested here are the signifiers for journeys: tickets, postcards, letters—recording unseemly haste, enforced idleness, losing one’s way, and sometimes finding it again.
Hotel Montreal
By Ken Norris
Selections from 19 groundbreaking books of poetry that draw together the very best of Norris’s lyric poetry from a 25-year period, while offering the reader an indispensible panoramic view of the work of a poet at the height of his creative powers.
hypoderm: notes to myself
By Weyman Chan
The idea for this book, says Weyman Chan, is simple—approach the world as metaphor, and it will come to you. Subtitled “notes to myself,” Hypoderm is a manifesto of observations, intimations and recognitions of mortality that get under the poet’s skin—that remind the reader that poetry is documentation and speculation, not a sentimental fabrication of the rapture (rupture) of our “end times.”
I. Another. The Space Between
By Jamie Reid
This selection draws from brilliantly impressionist early poems, a middle period of poetry relating to the author’s activist politics, and contemporary work suspended between the poles of the political and the lyrical, between the confrontation of the world of human affairs and the undeniable beauty of the earth and nature—the simple delight taken in life itself—with a clear understanding that the use of the word “natural” is almost always ideologically determined.
In the Dog House
Wanda John-Kehewin is, as she describes herself, “a First Nations woman searching for the truth and a way to be set free from the past” – shoving aside that lingering sense of shame and stigma – taking the reader on a healing journey that reveals language to be an elusive creature indeed and one that gives new definition to what being “in the dog house” could be, if we as human beings listen carefully and learn to remedy our misunderstandings.
inkorrect thots
By bill bissett
When bill bissett thinks “inkorrect thots” anything can happen.
Internodes
By Ken Belford
Moving with nomadic grace across the terrain of his previous book, Decompositions, the poetic language of Ken Belford in Internodes shares similar roots, traversing decades at the speed of a search query – pressing onward through Hazelton, the Bulkley Valley, and the unroaded head-waters of the Nass River in the Damdochax Valley – and meanwhile coming to terms with a poetry that “is lived” on the rugged streets of Prince George.
is a door
By Fred Wah
is a door uses the poem’s ability for “suddenness” to subvert closure: the sudden question, the sudden turn, the sudden opening—writing that is generated from linguistic mindfulness, improvisation, compositional problem solving, collaborative events, travel, investigation documentary.
Kerrisdale Elegies
Bowering responds to Rilke’s Duino Elegies. In the intertextuality of these two great works can be found post-modern writing that is self-aware, where the other is discovered in the process of the writer writing.
Last Scattering Surfaces
By Gil McElroy
These poems map out zones of interaction which took place in the “surface of last scattering”—the first formation of matter in the universe.
Limbo Road
By Ken Norris
Limbo _Road_—as divorce journal, meditation, travel poem—chronicles the search for the new beloved.
Liquidities
Liquidities: Vancouver Poems Then and Now gathers many of the poems from Daphne Marlatt’s 1972 Vancouver Poems, somewhat revised or in some cases substantially revised, and follows them with “Liquidities,” a series of recent poems about Vancouver’s incessant deconstruction and reconstruction, its quick transformations both on the ground and in urban imagining.
Love and Savagery
By Des Walsh
This book of poems is a sustained adoration of the beloved that echoes the work of the troubadours. The unnamed Irish woman of this collection “the complicated jewel of the Burren Peninsula,” leads the narrator on a spiritual quest from the streets of St John’s to the seeminingly impenetrable evergreen thickets of Ireland. Recently released as a feature film, Love and Savagery is a lyrical story of impossible love. On the twentieth anniversary of its first publication and the astonishing occasion of its release as a feature film, Talon has published a new edition of Love and Savagery, celebrating the transformation of the essence of such a finely crafted book of poetry into a film that pays homage to its literary roots.
loving without being vulnrabul
By bill bissett
Poems that tell stories on many different levels: through sound, visual images, political insights, non-narrative fusion and linguistic music.
Mêmewars
Mêmewars is a book writing against itself.
My Darling Nellie Grey
Initially lacking a “subject,” the book’s metanarrative almost inevitably took the shape of an exquisite poetic autobiography that is at once both intensely personal and profoundly public. In it, among many other astonishments, we discover the deeply ambiguous roots of his father’s favourite folksong; we catch a fleeting childhood glimpse of Bowering’s young mother; a complete history of Cuba in the context of US foreign policy in Latin America that gives an entirely new, but older, meaning to the date September 11; and the roots of tragedy that led to the “Balkanization” of Yugoslavia.
narrativ enigma / rumours uv hurricane
By bill bissett
Through narrative, non-narrative, sound, song, meditation, metaphysical, spiritual, political and visual poems, bissett explores the fragility and incompletion of all narratives.
News & Smoke
A compact and beautifully designed collection, nicely fleshed out with a broad selection of poems previously published only in journals and periodicals, not to mention its tantalizing sampling of new fare. Many will discover plenty to admire in News and Smoke.
— Toronto Star
Noise from the Laundry
By Weyman Chan
Weyman Chan’s poems elaborate his singular and solitary work on the renaissance of the contemporary lyric form.
NonZero Definitions
By Gil McElroy
The language of poetics emerges into the light of the purely formalist and luminous “definitions” of things and their movements as they engage in the ceaseless metamorphosis of replication in all of their endlessly unfolding possibilities.
northern wild roses / deth interrupts th dansing
By bill bissett
His rejection of the limiting conventions of written language has allowed bissett to foreground the appearance of any linguistic event as a living performance.
On the Material
Structured in three parts, On the Material is a meditation on language, geography, socio-economics and the body, moving from the glut of fossil-fuelled consumer excess to the materiality of a single book. The final section is a sequence of poems in memory of Stephen Collis’s departed sister, Gail Tulloch, becoming a way for the poet to read back into the elemental heart of absence and loss—the “material” of the books displacing, and in some way recovering, how language holds the materiality of the physical world.
Ordinary Time
By Gil McElroy
Gil McElroy’s new book of poems sets out to give shape to time from four different referents: the Distant Early Warning (DEW) Line of the High Arctic where McElroy’s father worked, the Julian calendar of classical antiquity, the structure of the Anglican lectionary and its cycle of daily and weekly scriptures (called “propers”), and Stephen Hawking’s description of imaginary time.
Pacific Windows
The most important poetic works of Roy Kiyooka.
Pell Mell
By Robin Blaser
Pell Mell, the middle voice, the syntax meeting its astonishments in its forward stride looking backwards, imagining an image nation where the heart is always torn, to pieces possessed by the other(s).
peter among th towring boxes / text bites
By bill bissett
bissett’s deliciously comic interrogation of the socio-political events towering around us like so many boxes we need constantly to imagine our way out of, is counterpoised in this collection by a recurring dream of a future locked in a global war.
Phyllis Webb and the Common Good
Phyllis Webb is a poet around whom archetypes tend to cluster: the reclusive artist; the distraught, borderline suicidal Sapphic woman poet. While on the surface she seems someone supremely disinterested in the public sphere, argues Stephen Collis in this brilliant and revealing new celebration of her work, her work sweeps into the wilds of politics, philosophy, economics and her slim books speak volumes. Webb’s work points steadily towards the idea that the poem is not a commodity to be hoarded, but a response-ability to be shared, an aspect of the commons and our “common good.”
Popular Narratives
By Frank Davey
This book of prose poems strips down the codes and conventions that make up our society’s “popular narratives.” A revealing and witty, exploded view of our culture.
Post-Prairie
25 individual talents come together in this groundbreaking collection for a rare literary event: the transition of a cultural identity primarily rooted in place to one that is rooted in a rapidly fragmenting, technology-based globalization.
Rebuild
Murakami approaches the urban centre through its inhabitants’ greatest passion: real estate, where the drive to own is coupled with the practice of tearing down and rebuilding. Rebuild engraves itself on the absence at the city’s centre, with its vacant civic square and its bulldozed public spaces. The poems crumble in the time it takes to turn the page, words flaking from the line like the rain-damaged stucco of a leaky condominium.
scars on th seehors
By bill bissett
bissett’s metric performs a kind of absence of narrative intent that lets everyone and everything speak for itself. As bissett puts it, “eye dont have 2 invent th world iumalredee in it.”
Selected Poems: Beyond Even Faithful Legends
By bill bissett
A definitive and comprehensive selection of bissett’s work.
Selected Poems: Loki Is Buried at Smoky Creek
By Fred Wah
Poems of landscape, language and memory from Wah’s earlier books.
Selected Poems: The Arches
By Frank Davey
Selections from seven of this important poet and editor’s long poems.
Selected Poems: The Vision Tree
By Phyllis Webb
Poetry distinguished by its attention to form and thought.
Selected Writing
Poetry and prose with an instantaneous recognition of perceptions and thought.
Selected Writing
By bp Nichol
Selections from visual poetry to translations by one of the most important poets in the 20th century writing in English.
Sentenced to Light
By Fred Wah
An astonishing series of unique collaborative image-text projects, Sentenced to Light privileges its poetic and formal textual space outside most of the images that are its original twins and offers the reader a glimpse of the dialectic of larger conversations, the unpredictable, improvisatory bavardage that whispers between words and pictures in an intrinsically poetic space.
Singed Wings
Working for decades in English and French in poetry, novels, and translations that investigate the relationship between language and female subjectivity, Lola Lemire Tostevin has hewn her own unique and intensely aesthetic path across the national literary landscape, earning her the reputation as one of Canada’s leading feminist writers.
Tostevin’s latest offering of poetry emerges from her deep-seated interest in the creativity of women who face advanced age and its ailments. Through study of exhibitions in galleries and museums, films and dance performances, and voluminous “bodies” of text, it became clear to Tostevin that aging not only serves women’s creativity but also reinforces it, revealing many forms of strength in vulnerability.
Singed Wings invites the reader to peer into the interior world of Camille Claudel, whose intimate understanding of her subjects, from young girl to old woman, captured quite a different power than that of her lover, sculptor Auguste Rodin. Although Claudel was not able to fully realize her creative process into old age, many others did, including Louise Bourgeois, Frida Kahlo, Betty Goodwin, Pina Bausch, and Agnès Varda, and it is in direct response to the vital creativity of these women that the poet finds the inspiration and determination to move her own art forward.
Spurred on by these groundbreaking precedents that displace the narcissistic, “shopworn” notion of the ideal woman described only in terms of desired female form, Tostevin allocates space where a writer facing her own aging process can use the experience to give it new shapes in language, positing that reimagining the various creative forms of women into language is a postmodern undertaking in an artistic milieu where postmodernism may turn out to have as many heads as the mythical Hydra.
Specks
When McClure’s Specks was first published in 1985 by Talonbooks, it was a revelation in terms of its transcending the proprioceptive poetic methodology of Charles Olson and entering an Aristotelian realm of metaphysical questions that alchemically combined matters both scientific and mystical. With mind aglow in recognition of muscular imagination and the intelligence of the sensorium in all its unapologetic tonality, McClure’s luminous journey leaps with the grace of Muhammad Ali and Fred Astaire, and tempts the reader into the mysterious abyss of dark energy that Federico García Lorca calls duende.
Sticks & Stones
George Bowering’s first book of poetry finally in print. With a preface by Robert Creeley and original line drawings by Gordon Payne.
sublingual
By bill bissett
sublingual is perhaps the most highly structured yet of bissett’s “textual visions.” Its first seven poems construct a Genesis, beginning with a poem of birth—our pre- or sub-lingual first breath, a phenomenological gesture of recognition, of both being and belonging, in and of the world. Following this short creation story, the book continues to unfold in luminous and lucid delight.
th influenza uv logik
By bill bissett
Canada’s most linguistically innovative poet takes on the “linear binary traps” of conventional logic, history and politics.
th last photo uv th human soul
By bill bissett
bissett has remained on a permanent world tour for over thirty years, writing this book while on a European reading circuit that included performances in London, Manchester, Cardiff, Dublin, Paris, Mainz, Trier and Berlin.
The Centre: Poems 1970-2000
The Centre: Poems 1970–2000 begins with a long poem sequence that initiates McKinnon’s engagement of and life in the north with new and unavoidably present recognitions. The “centre” in this sequence of ten long poems thus shifts from a nostalgic, idealized and elegiac rural singularity to a new relentless multiplicity of the urban, where the centre constantly threatens not to hold. The “centre” in these books becomes a multiplicity of urban attentions reproducing itself as an articulate awareness of a fractured and fragmented self in a wasteland where beauty appears only through glimpses of externalized objects of desire.
The Collected Books of Artie Gold
By Artie Gold
Born in 1947, Artie Gold appeared like a supernova within the constellation of Montreal Anglophone poets in the late 1960s. Intensely devoted to poetry, having already discovered the work of Frank O’Hara, John Wieners, and Jack Spicer in his teens, six books of his poems were published in each of the years 1974–79. Daunted by asthma, complicated by rapidly proliferating allergies and emphysema, he increasingly retreated from the world. At the urging of his friends, a Selected Poems was published in 1992, but only one further book appeared in print in 2003. Artie left the world on St. Valentine’s Day, 2007. His eight published books of poetry collected here shine like a beacon of Northern Lights across the literary landscape of the late twentieth century.
The Commons
Tearing down (intellectual) property’s fencing, Collis’s poems demonstrate that what we call, in less inspired moments, “allusion,” “borrowing,” or even (pretentiously) “intertextuality” is just what poetry itself proves time and again: our languages are common. Shared. Un-enclosable.
The Empress Has No Closure
The Empress Has No Closure contains, as a centre-piece, the “Alefbet Transfers,” a meditative, spacial explication of the 22 figures of the Hebrew alphabet.
The House that Hijack Built
Explores the possibilities of meaning production when language is pushed to its limits of normative semantic patterns. Includes a homolinguistic “trans’elation” of the Sefer Yetzirah.
The Invisibility Exhibit
Murakami’s first book of poetry, written in the political and emotional wake of Vancouver’s “Missing Women,” this project investigates the troubled relationship between a marginalized neighbourhood’s “invisible” populations and the city that surrounds them.
The Monument Cycles
While many of the poems in The Monument Cycles speak to Vancouver as a whole, several focus specifically on the city’s Downtown Eastside (“the poorest postal code in Canada”); they explore the poet’s experiences working in this community and write toward possibility, remembrance, and the nature of truth and storytelling.
The Moustache
Bowering and Greg Curnoe became friends when their art was in its youth, and for 26 years they grew up parallel, inside each other’s work.
The New Long Poem Anthology
Features the work of Blaser, Bowering, Brand, Carson, Derksen, Dudek, Dewdney, Friesen, Hartog, Kiyooka, Kroetsch, Marlatt, McCaffery, McFadden, McKay, McKinnon, Mouré, Nichol, Ondaatje, Robertson, Stanley, Tostevin, Villemaire, Wah and Webb.
The Place of Scraps
By Jordan Abel
The Place of Scraps revolves around Marius Barbeau, an early-twentieth-century ethnographer, who studied many of the First Nations cultures in the Pacific Northwest, including Jordan Abel’s ancestral Nisga’a Nation. Barbeau, in keeping with the popular thinking of the time, believed First Nations cultures were about to disappear completely, and that it was up to him to preserve what was left of these dying cultures while he could. Unfortunately, his methods of preserving First Nations cultures included purchasing totem poles and potlatch items from struggling communities in order to sell them to museums. While Barbeau strove to protect First Nations cultures from vanishing, he ended up playing an active role in dismantling the very same cultures he tried to save.
The Properties
By Colin Browne
Poetry begins when the properties of things—and the correspondences among them—reveal themselves through language. Language is the veil that can pierce itself.
The poems in The Properties are a record of encounters between desire and the repressed or suppressed interstices of social, economic, political and unconscious forces. They’re alert to correspondences, attentive to the lines of force to which the poet’s family quietly assented in the contested place that is the Northwest Coast of North America.
The Rap Canterbury Tales
Hip-hop artist Brinkman resurrects Chaucer’s brilliant stories into visible and audible contemporary forms.
The Richard Brautigan Ahhhhhhhhhhh
By rob mclennan
Thoroughly grounded in the media culture of television and film, mclennan’s language casts a deceptively familiar veil over the breadth and depth of reading which inform this
work.
The Shovel
By Colin Browne
In this extraordinary book, Colin Browne inverts the traditional ways we define and privilege forms of the English language; self-expression becomes prosaic, the recording of history poetic.
The Singer's Broken Throat
By Des Walsh
The Singer’s Broken Throat is a collection of poems that trace a path through both physical and emotional landscapes. Each step of the narrative way is marked by an event of the heart, each image is a map of person and place. Des Walsh’s fourth book of poetry echoes his extensive film and theatre work: the voices here are always dramatic and present, not passive and absent, even when the poems are elegiac in form and substance, even when their subject is historic. These poems disclose the fragility and wonderment of relationships, as well as remind us that we are all alive to each other inextricable from our frames in both time and space.
The Vestiges
By Jeff Derksen
Based on the experience of city life, The Vestiges moves across the uneven geography of the present, linking historical moments when quarters of cities were squatted, when social change boiled and the future was up for grabs. In the context of our precarious present, the poem “The Vestiges,” around which the book is built, “sets out to explore / what happens / to humans when they are reduced / to things by other humans.”
Theogony / Works and Days
By Hesiod
An adaptation of Hesiod’s two great poems that paved the way for subsequent achievements of Greek philosophy, most notably those of Plato. Theogony tells of the first generations of the gods and Works and Days examines the twofold role of competition in life, what Hesiod calls “the bad strife” and “the good strife” and how they affect our daily struggles.
There'll Be Another
Three books in one: Heavy-Hearted in Havana, Sex with a Sixteen Year Old and Anonymity Suite Part II.
This Poem
This Poem is an ironic investigation of contemporary culture and the technomediatic saturated world in which we’re enmeshed. Composed in the style of Facebook updates or extended Tweets, and mashing-up lexicons of Stein, Zukofsky, Shakespeare, Whitman, financial meltdown, semiotic theory, Lady Gaga, Derrida, and Flickr streams, This Poem is a self-reflexive romp through shards and fragments of post-consumerist culture.
This Tremor Love Is
This Tremor Love Is is a memory book—an album of love poems spanning twenty-five years, from Marlatt’s first writing of what was to become the opening section, A Lost Book, to its latest, most recent sequences.
ths is erth thees ar peopul
By bill bissett
The quest in this latest fusion of song, sound, performance and visual poetry from bill bissett is for a human condition outside the perpetual terror of the 21st century.
time
By bill bissett
time is reelee abt how evreething is fleeting n how we deel with that n how deeplee we undrstand that awareness th jewels shine as our undrstandings th layrs n openings apertures n iris lens in or not n how manee narrativs reveel our paradoxikul n continualee shifting minds … a storee is what time is it … 4 ourselvs n our specees n how timeless th breth uv th galaxee n oftn ourselvs tho agen fleeting lyrik song chant philosophikal theologikul prsonal propheseez vizual n tanguld tangos … with th invisibul dansrs … n th 4tune tellrs shuffuling theyr decks how we yern 4 n letting go uv our games finding love n th chancs 4 savin th environment n our selvs [bill bissett]
To the Barricades
To the Barricades continues Collis’s “life” poem, “The Barricades Project,” which also includes Anarchive (2005) and The Commons (2008). Both the anti-archive of the revolutionary record and the dream of a once and future “commons” upon which all can equally dwell continue to shape these poems where words are hurried bricks thrown up as “barricades” in language.
Transnational Muscle Cars
By Jeff Derksen
Written over the last ten years in a quartet of cities: Calgary, Toronto, New York and Vienna, Transnational Muscle Cars is the second book in Jeff Derksen’s trilogy addressing place, culture and capital, and draws on a wide array of North American post-war poetics—the declarative aspects of New American Poetry, the pop cultural details of the New York School, the reflexive politics of the Language Poets, the personal politics of the Kootenay School of Writing—and on contemporary cultural and political theory, critical geography, urban theory, and architectural concepts.
Triage
In a world where the corporate iron fist clad in the velvet glove of the state has appropriated all that is authentic and authoritative in language, there seems little left for us to say to each other. Yet against the determination of borders, capital, criminalization and violence, stigmatized bodies also remember patterns, history, possibility and solidarity. Triage attempts an ordered, critical response to the surges of overlapping manufactured crises that perpetuate the conditions and symptoms of our public and private disentitlements.
Vermeer's Light
This much anticipated volume is now available in paperback.
what's left
By rob mclennan
Presents us with cues and clues to the poet’s compositional strategies.
Daniel MacIvor’s Cul-de-sac Reviewed by Ed Huyck
Cul-de-sac, a play by Daniel MacIvor, is currently being staged in Minneapolis, Minnesota, put on by the Loudmouth Collective at the Open Eye Figure Theatre.
Ed Huyck reviewed the play for CityPages.com. A few excerpts follow.
Monday May 6, 2013 in Meta-Talon
Way More Than A Thousand Words: Coping with Emotions and Otters Launch
Ash Tanasiychuk takes pictures. Of Dina Del Bucchia. Nuff said. Oh, and Otters!
Monday April 29, 2013 in Meta-Talon
Other People’s Moccasins: Joanne Arnott Interviews Wanda John-Kehewin
Joanne Arnott interviews Wanda John-Kehewin about her new book In the Dog House:
I can’t really say there were many poets of the past that influenced my writing. I think when I really started to be inspired was when I heard that there were other Native writers, and that wasn’t until I moved to the West Coast in 1991. For some reason I didn’t think it was actually something an “Indian” could do. There weren’t any books in the library that were by First Nations people when I was growing up.
Thursday April 25, 2013 in Meta-Talon
Text in the City: Music Somewhere Near a Griffin
Garry Thomas Morse on poetry prizes and/or music in poetry. Whatever!
Not to pull an academy-bashing Joaquin Phoenix, but strictly off the record, I’ve never understood how prizes relate to poetry, exactly, and a number of acclaimed poets have confessed a similar sentiment in my presence, in one way or another. One would hope that a poet only gets into the racket out of an imperative need to do so, if not a compulsive love, implying all the emotions and forms of resentment love can contain. In that case, how can a prize for being the greatest lover compare to said love itself?
Fall 2013 Catalogue
CURRENT FRONT LIST
After Completion
Edited by Sharon Thesen & Ralph Maud
Non-Fiction
Ali & Ali
Camyar Chai & Guillermo Verdecchia & Marcus Youssef
Drama
And Slowly Beauty
Michel Nadeau
Translated by Maureen Labonté
Drama
Internodes
Ken Belford
Poetry
Kafka's Hat
Patrice Martin
Translated by Chantal Bilodeau
Fiction
Modern Canadian Plays, Vol. II – 5th Edition
Edited by Jerry Wasserman
Drama
My TWP Plays
Jack Winter
Drama
Rogue Cells / Carbon Harbour
Garry Thomas Morse
Fiction
Singed Wings
Lola Lemire Tostevin
Poetry
The (Post) Mistress
Tomson Highway
Drama
The Place of Scraps
Jordan Abel
Poetry
The Vestiges
Jeff Derksen
Poetry
The Visual Laboratory of Robert Lepage
Ludovic Fouquet
Translated by Rhonda Mullins
Non-Fiction
They Called Me Number One
Bev Sellars
Non-Fiction
Wigrum
Daniel Canty
Translated by Oana Avasilichioaei
Fiction
Copyright Talonbooks 1963-2013
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