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- September 2010
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Wednesday September 8, 2010
Pivot Readings - Jesse Huisken, rob mclennan and Meaghan Strimas -
Thursday September 9, 2010
Tear the Curtain! - Jonathon Young and Kevin Kerr -
Thursday September 9, 2010
Vigil - Morris Panych -
Tuesday September 14, 2010
The Trespassers by Morris Panych - Belfry Theatre -
Tuesday September 14, 2010
The Olive Reading Series presents a night with Robert Kroetsch -
Friday September 17, 2010
The Refugee Hotel - Passe Muraille -
Friday September 24, 2010
David Homel at the Kingston WritersFest -
Friday September 24, 2010
Adeena Karasick at the Kingston WritersFest -
Sunday September 26, 2010
Carmen Aguirre - Word on the Street -
Tuesday September 28, 2010
Ali & Ali: The Deportation Hearings
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.
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.
Cultural Mischief
By Frank Davey
A collection of prose poems on the hyperbolic absurdities of multiculturalism in action.
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.
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
An ironically revealing, humourous and analytic book.
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.
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.
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 20th 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.
How to Write
How to Write is a perverse Coles Notes: a paradigm of prosody where writing as sampling, borrowing, cutting-and-pasting and mash-up meets literature. This collection of conceptual short fiction takes inspiration from Lautréamont’s decree that “plagiarism is necessary. It is implied in the idea of progress. It clasps the author’s sentence tight, uses his expressions, eliminates a false idea, replaces it with the right idea.”
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.
inkorrect thots
By bill bissett
When bill bissett thinks “inkorrect thots” anything can happen.
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.
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.
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.
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
By bill bissett
A definitive and comprehensive selection of bissett’s work.
Selected Poems
By Frank Davey
Selections from seven of this important poet and editor’s long poems.
Selected Poems
By Fred Wah
Poems of landscape, language and memory from Wah’s earlier books.
Selected Poems
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.
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 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 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.
There'll Be Another
Three books in one: Heavy-Hearted in Havana, Sex with a Sixteen Year Old and Anonymity Suite Part II.
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]
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.
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.
Wednesday September 1, 2010 in Meta-Talon
If Nothing Was to Happen in Autumn: Something on The Collected Books of Artie Gold
Garry Thomas Morse discovers Gold:
He imbues this particular book with a wonderful nonchalance that tempers the sense of desperation about—what else but the difficulty and often failure of language to serve as a vehicle for our thoughts and emotions, at least not without a great deal of tinkering. Artie Gold leaves behind one poem after another for us, “like a cake placed in a two hour oven / in a building with a bomb, not caring.”
Wednesday September 1, 2010 in Meta-Talon
Terrorism: Today’s ‘Yellow Peril’?
Author Roy Miki studied the official language that stripped his Japanese Canadian family of rights. He sees lessons for today.
Friday August 20, 2010 in Meta-Talon
Rational Babblerap with BABA Brinkman
Creator of the first peer-reviewed hip-hop show, Darwin devotee and science celebrant Baba Brinkman is intent on spreading the word, discovers Roger Cox
Tuesday August 17, 2010 in Meta-Talon
Artie Gold - from The Collected Books of Artie Gold
Preview a poem from The Collected Books of Artie Gold (coming this fall).
CURRENT FRONT LIST
Abraham Lincoln Goes to The Theatre
Larry Tremblay
Translated by Chantal Bilodeau
Drama
Beating the Bushes
Steven Bush
Drama
Imperial Canada Inc.
Alain Deneault
Translated by Fred A. Reed & Robin Philpot
Non-Fiction
Muthologos: Lectures and Interviews
Charles Olson
Edited by Ralph Maud
Non-Fiction
News: Postcards from Four Directions
Drew Hayden Taylor
Non-Fiction
Piercing
Larry Tremblay
Translated by Linda Gaboriau
Fiction
Subject To Change
Renee Rodin
Fiction
The Collected Books of Artie Gold
Artie Gold
Edited by Ken Norris & Endre Farkas
Poetry
The Edward Curtis Project
Marie Clements
Photographs by Rita Leistner
Drama
The Five Books of Moses Lapinsky
Karen X. Tulchinsky
Fiction
The Madonna Painter
Michel Marc Bouchard
Translated by Linda Gaboriau
Drama
The Refugee Hotel
Carmen Aguirre
Drama
The Satchmo' Suite
Hans Böggild & Doug Innis
Drama
time
bill bissett
Poetry
With Bated Breath
Bryden MacDonald
Drama
Copyright Talonbooks 1963-2010
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