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    ISBN: 9780889229471 | Hardback

    648 pages | Pub. Date: 20151109
    6 W × 9 H × 1.25 D inches
    Backlist | Poetry | Bisac: POE011000
    Rights: WORLD

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    ISBN: 9780889229488 | Paperback

    648 pages | Pub. Date: 20161108
    6 W × 9 H × 1 D inches
    Backlist | Poetry | Bisac: POE011000
    Rights: WORLD

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Scree
The Collected Earlier Poems, 1962–1991
By Fred Wah
Introduction by Jeff Derksen

Fred Wah’s career has spanned six decades and a range of formal styles and preoccupations. Scree collects Wah’s concrete and sound poetry of the 1960s, his landscape-centric work of the 1970s, and his ethnicity-oriented poems of the 1980s. Fred was a founding member of the avant-garde TISH group, which helped turn Canadian poetry, in the West in particular, to a focus on language. He has said that his “writing has been sustained, primarily, by two interests: racial hybridity and the local.”

Most of Wah’s early work is out of print. This collection allows readers to (re)discover this groundbreaking work. The volume contains:
Lardeau (1965)
Mountain (1967)
Among (1972)
Tree (1972)
Earth (1974)
Pictograms from the Interior of B.C. (1975)
Loki Is Buried at Smoky Creek (1980)
Owner’s Manual (1981)
Breathin’ My Name with a Sigh (1981)
Grasp the Sparrow’s Tail (1982)
Waiting for Saskatchewan (1985)
Rooftops (1988)
So Far (1991)

The collection has been organized according to a chronology of composition (rather than a chronology of original publication): this reveals new connections and thematic trajectories in the body of work as a whole, and makes the book an eminently “teachable” volume. The book includes full-colour facsimiles of two early books, Earth and Tree, reproduced to show the “hands-on” object-based aspect of chapbook publishing.

Commended 2015 Best 75 Books (CBC Books)

"This is surely the best poetry book of the year! It is so important that this work is being done, both the writing and the editing."
—Phil Hall, BookThug

"Distinctive, eclectic, and remarkable."
—Nicholas Bradley, BC BookWorld

By Fred Wah

Fred Wah was one of the founding editors of the poetry newsletter TISH. Of his seventeen books of poetry, is a door received the BC Book Prize, Waiting For Saskatchewan received the Governor-General’s Award and So Far was awarded the Stephanson Award for Poetry. Diamond Grill, a biofiction about hybridity and growing up in a small-town Chinese-Canadian café won the Howard O’Hagan Award for Short Fiction, and his collection of critical writing, Faking It: Poetics and Hybridity, received the Gabrielle Roy Prize.

Read more about Fred Wah


Introduction by Jeff Derksen

Jeff Derksen’s poetry and critical writing on art, urbanism and text have been published in Europe and North America. He collaborates on visual art and research projects (focusing on urban issues) with the research collective Urban Subjects. Derksen’s Down Time won the 1991 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Award at the BC Book Prizes.

Read more about Jeff Derksen


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