news | Monday December 16, 2013

New Arrivals! And Slowly Beauty (Drama) & The Vestiges (Poetry)

Slipping in under the closing door of 2013 are two new arrivals: And Slowly Beauty by Michel Nadeau (translated by Maureen Labonté) and 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. “The Vestiges” is a long poem engaged with modernist poems that move from the particularities of everyday life to enduring and unanswered political and cultural questions. Covering a wide terrain of research, the other serial poems in the book mine various texts, from the Craigslist “auto parts” section to Jane Jacobs, from Marx to Marcuse, and from historical accounts of cities to contemporary real-estate promotions, in order to build up an eclectic atlas of this unstable moment.

In And Slowly Beauty, everything changes on what begins as a typical day in the life of the aptly named Mr. Mann, a forty-eight-year-old, buttoned-down, middle management type in a pinstriped grey suit, who feels himself losing touch with his job, his wife, his children, and the rest of his urban life. He wins tickets to a production of Chekhov’s Three Sisters and realizes that the mid-life cocoon he has spun around himself is beginning to unwind.

Below is a clip from the 2011 production of And Slowly Beauty, which was staged at the Belfry Theatre in Victoria, BC:

And Slowly Beauty is available for $17.95 and The Vestiges for $16.95. Now is a great time to snap up copies of these new titles! Buy from Talonbooks.com and get free shipping to anywhere in North America until December 24, 2013 (there are still a few days left)!