Originally twelve years in the making! Featuring a cast of thousands. It still stars the letter H, and introduces Probable Systems, Negatives, and the Actual Life of Language! Your heart will pound as you see H's turn into I's before your very own eyes. You'll thrill as words fall apart only to create other words. You'll gasp as bp Nichol collaborates with the dead. You'll shake your head in disbelief as he walks the line between fact and fiction one step beyond into the twilight zone of pataphysics.
Poetry
- Author:Nichol, bpSummary:
- Author:Hartsfield, CarlaSummary:
Longlisted for the 2004 ReLit Awards
Carla Hartsfield sings praises to the unusual: a rose blooming in December; an angel dancing on a cardiologist’s scanner; Glenn Gould playing Brahms at Angelo’s Garage. But these are common occurrences in Your Last Day on Earth, the everyday world and the metaphysical realm sharing the same ecstatic poem. Hartsfield transforms the contents of her psyche into music that we can all hear, the kind that replays for days in the dark, dreamy parts of our selves.
She was here inside the purple-eyed daisies
and honeysuckle lining the fence —arriving seconds after visiting the moon,
her starched, white dresscascading from frothy clouds —
but even more white like the lightthat is said to emanate from reverence.
from “Nightshine”
“Carla Hartsfield is, like a figure in one of these vivid poems, ‘a charming pyromaniac.’ Under her magnifying glass, the world bristles into smoke: the ‘starched hexagons’ of Queen Anne’s Lace ‘quiver with cocaine bloom’ and water drops become ‘diamonds’ on the speaker’s skin when she plays Bach naked after a shower. Sometimes these fires liberate, sometimes they celebrate, sometimes they memorialize, and always they transform.” – Stephanie Bolster
- Author:Gillis, SusanSummary:
Inviting, human, capacious poems that grapple with ideas while also lightly grieving our capacity for ruin.
- Author:Henderson, BrianSummary:
Year Zero is the time of hushed beginnings and endings, the place of naming and unnaming, where language, strange to itself, tiptoes along songlines as though following passages of Koto music. In Brian Henderson’s poetry, poised and listening on this hinge of creativity, ontological wonder is informed by awareness of the paradoxes at the heart of language, that language wants you for itself, and that what is named, falls. Whether focusing on the dying of a parent or fellow poet, or on the coming-to-be of a child, this poetry is alive with the truth that “The dead burn through us/ the not yet born.”
“What a wonderful book this is! Henderson tells the old story how dear ones die, and new lives come to be. In a world that’s dense, opaque, yet lit with random hints of something being uttered. The result is a marvel of passionate, glancing eloquence. I wanted it never to end.” –Dennis Lee
- Author:Roberts, KevinSummary:
Speaking of Kevin Roberts, the Australian writer Nigel Krauth says, “Roberts takes the common man’s point of view and proves that humanity is still connected to the great turning of the universe.” Certainly this “New and Selected” provides ample evidence of Roberts’ sense of connectedness, as he selects the best from his previous eleven books of poetry and shows that for over thirty years he has been one of the more powerful voices on the Canadian scene.
Like Ted Hughes, Roberts frequently employs strong images of the countryside to explore the human condition – as in his earliest volume, Cariboo Fishing Notes (1973), where he works the trout streams of the Cariboo for what the art of fishing reveals of philosophical stances. Roberts also explores the work culture of Canada’s resource economy, as in Deep Line which tells of skippering a salmon trolling boat and “deep lining” the fish.
In S’ney’mos, Roberts widens his themes to document in poetic terms the coal mining history of Nanaimo and the effect mining had on the aboriginal people of the area. Stonefish takes Roberts into new territory in Tahiti, with a sequence of poems based on the life of Gauguin. In Cobalt 3, Roberts again opens up new territory when he offers a grim but blackly comic rendering of his own personal duel with cancer. With the addition of many new poems in Writing the Tides, Roberts shows that he is still at the top of his form.
- Author:Conroy, PatSummary:
How should we improve the state of South Carolina? That invitingly open-ended question served as the basis for the first annual South Carolina High School Writing Contest as the call went out in fall 2013 to juniors and seniors across the Palmetto State, encouraging them to take a stance through good, thought-provoking writing. The nearly 500 responses that resulted were as impressive in quality as they were in quantity. Young writers sounded off on issues of race relations, environmental conservation, economic imbalance, opportunities of infrastructure, substance and physical abuse, and the maladies of education. Most wrote on issues of education rooted in their own burgeoning awareness of its gifts and limitations in their lives. From that pool of contestants, 23 finalists rose to the top to have their initial entries and subsequent writing on a favorite book or place judged by best-selling author Pat Conroy. The insightful and often revelatory responses from those finalists — including the first-, second- and third-place winners by grade — are collected here in Writing South Carolina. In heartfelt essays, poems, short stories and drama, these diverse writers lay bare their attitudes and impressions of South Carolina as they have experienced it and as they hope to reshape it. The resulting anthology is a compelling portrait of the Palmetto State's potential as advocated by some of its best and brightest young writers. Editor Steven Lynn provides an introduction, and contest judge Pat Conroy provides a foreword to the collection.
- Author:Berry, JulieSummary:
Reading Julie Berry’s poetry means entering a new poetic space, crossing thresholds of pain and delight at once raw and refined. “like marie d’oignies who buried bloody/ mouthfuls of herself/ in the garden/ i need my poems to be like this,” Berry writes in “Touching Ground.” “Like this” is finely-turned and constantly surprising, haunting as plainsong, throaty as the blues. Her images are so completely unexpected and yet so thoroughly right that you are left wondering why you never imagined “the minute hand [falling] into the refrigerator and breakfast/ . . . clattering across the lawn/ its spoons and bowls and burning toast.” Her eye is keen and quirky; its wide embrace enfolds the highways and cemeteries of southwestern Ontario, flying pianos, her lover’s ex-neck, Elizabeth Graves Simcoe, furniture cleaners, suicides and mass strandings. And of course her reader. Here is a poet whose honesty and wry humour loosen the tangles of the heart.
“When you walk into the world with these poems in your head, the world has a new clarity, more light. The most startling and unforgettable book of poetry I’ve read in a long time.” – Susan Musgrave
- Author:Mead, JaneSummary:
Mead's fifth collection candidly and openly explores the long process that is death. These resonant poems discover what it means to live, die, and come home again. We're drawn in by sorrow and grief, but also the joys of celebrating a long life and how simple it is to find laughter and light in the quietest and darkest of moments.
- Author:Venart, S.E.Summary:
Longlisted for the 2008 ReLit Awards
Whatever their subject — the unwinding of lovers, childhood as the foundation of being, the metaphorical life of everyday objects and events — S.E. Venart’s poems show us a kind of courage that is quotidian. Surviving childhood, surviving failed love, finding solace in the self, and reinvigorating that self: this is the world Venart reveals to us, in all its prescient detail. A honest and lyrical first book.
…The car gained momentum, sped down hills.
Over one tanned sister’s shoulder I saw vivid fieldslocked behind white lengths of birch. Wires loped
between attendant poles. Strapped into our seats,we had in common things we couldn’t get at.
Up on the wires, small birds alighted, fluttered offas if together they’d all heard
the same charged message.from “Power Lines”
“Venart’s poetry reveals itself in the world of mysteries that lies between ‘one bright orange next to one bright knife.’ Such is the domestic tension she creates, where home is turned inside out so the familiar becomes unfamiliar. Yet the power of her writing shows how simple things, observed with clarity, are lit from within. This is a book to read, then read again: once for the bright orange and once for the bright knife.”
-Anne Simpson
- Author:Diaka, Ama AsantewaSummary:
An entirely fresh and powerful look at womanhood and personhood in a shifting world. Moving between Ghana and the United States, Diaka probes those countries' ever-changing cultural expectations and norms while investigating the dislocation and fragmentation of a body, and a mind, so often restless or ill at ease.
- Author:Cisneros, SandraSummary:
Woman Without Shame is a moving collection of songs, elegies, and declarations that chronicle her pilgrimage toward rebirth and the recognition of her prerogative as a woman artist. These bluntly honest and often humorous meditations on memory, desire, and the essential nature of love blaze a path toward self-awareness. For Cisneros, Woman Without Shame is the culmination of her search for home--in the Mexico of her ancestors and in her own heart.
- Author:D'Iorio, ChrisSummary:
Tragic-comedic genius emerges in this first book by Chris D’Iorio, kaleidoscopically vivid poetry that is commoditized with the placid title of Without Blue, innocently confessing a condition of lack-lustre lack. A few disarmingly personal lyrics usher us into a book that seems rather sincere and contemplative. Then the intensely capable drive of the poet shifts gears into his Grand Prix artistic race that pits the mud of cynicism against poetry’s slickly navigable satirical engine of agency. Homer, Mallarmé and Ginsberg cohort with D’Iorio in a serious call out of our culture’s infatuation with breakneck profit, profligate glamour and political impunity.
- Author:Schulman, GraceSummary:
"Without a Claim is a modern Book of Psalms. Indeed, the glory in these radiant sacred songs meld an art of high music with a nuanced love of the world unlike any we've heard before. No matter your mood upon entering this world you'll soon be grateful, and enchanted. In any such house of praise, God herself must be grateful."-Philip Schultz, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Failure and The God of Loneliness Grace Schulman, who has been called "a vital and permanent poet" (Harold Bloom), makes new the life she finds in other cultures and in the distant past. In Without a Claim, she masterfully encompasses music, faith, art, and history. The title poem alludes to the Montauk sachem who sold land without any concept of rights to property, and meditates on our own notion of ownership: "No more than geese in flight, shadowing the lawn, / cries piercing wind, do we possess these fields, / given the title, never the dominion." She traces the illusion of rights, from land to objects, from our loves to our very selves. Alternatively, she finds permanence in art, whether in galleries or on cave walls, and in music, whether in the concert hall, on the streets of New York, or in the waves at sea.
- Author:Vallotton, Jean-PierreSummary:
Where other poets of his generation developed strategies of deconstruction, Jean-Pierre Vallotton invented a brave new mosaic with the parameters left behind by traditionalism, modernism and postmodernism. If William Wordsworth, Oscar Wilde, T.S. Eliot are considered decadent, then so is Jean-Pierre Vallotton a decadent; however, the sort of decadent that will be viewed as being great in years to come: “The space between us is a path of magnificence, and here the faintest of our footsteps draws forth a flower.” His neo-baroque poetry stands at the crossroads of whatever styles, forms, and contents led to this spot; and it is with the pernicious artefacts found here that Jean-Pierre Vallotton invents the unknown structures that will welcome the birds of paradise of tomorrow.
- Author:Blake, WilliamSummary:
A poet, artist, and mystic, Blake declared that "I must Create a System or be enslav'd by another Man's." And create he did. Included here are such well-known poems as "Tyger! Tyger! burning bright."
- Author:Alexander, KwameSummary:
This powerful memoir from a #1 New York Times bestselling author and Newbery Medalist features poetry, letters, recipes, and other personal artifacts that provide an intimate look into his life and the loved ones he shares it with. In a powerfully intimate and non-traditional (or "new-fashioned") memoir, Kwame Alexander shares snapshots of a man learning how to love. He takes us through stories of his parents: from being awkward newlyweds in the sticky Chicago summer of 1967, to the sometimes-confusing ways they showed their love to each other, and for him. He explores his own relationships-his difficulties as a newly wedded, 22-year-old father, and the precariousness of his early marriage working in a jazz club with his second wife. Alexander attempts to deal with the unravelling of his marriage and the grief of his mother's recent passing while sharing the solace he found in learning how to perfect her famous fried chicken dish. With an open heart, Alexander weaves together memories of his past to try and understand his greatest love: his daughters. Full of heartfelt reminisces, family recipes, love poems, and personal letters, Why Fathers Cry at Night inspires bravery and vulnerability in every reader who has experienced the reckless passion, heartbreak, failure, and joy that define the whirlwind woes and wonders of love.
- Author:Brossard, Nicole, Majzels, Robert, Moure, ErínSummary:
Between the verbs quivering and streaming, White Piano unfolds its variations like musical scores. A play of resonance between pronouns and persons, freely percussive between prose and poetry, and narrating a constellation of questions, White Piano offers readers a 'language that cultivates its own craters of fire and savoir-vie.
- Author:Long Soldier, LayliSummary:
An astonishing, powerful debut. Whereas her birth signaled the responsibility as mother to teach what it is to be Lakota therein the question: What did I know about being Lakota? Signaled panic, blood rush my embarrassment. What did I know of our language but pieces? Would I teach her to be pieces? Until a friend comforted, Don't worry, you and your daughter will learn together. Today she stood sunlight on her shoulders lean and straight to share a song in Diné, her father's language. To sing she motions simultaneously with her hands; I watch her be in multiple musics. Whereas confronts the coercive language of the United States government in its responses, treaties, and apologies to Native American peoples and tribes, and reflects that language in its officiousness and duplicity back on its perpetrators. Through a virtuosic array of short lyrics, prose poems, longer narrative sequences, resolutions, and disclaimers, Layli Long Soldier has created a brilliantly innovative text to examine histories, landscapes, her own writing, and her predicament inside national affiliations. "I am," she writes, "a citizen of the United States and an enrolled member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, meaning I am a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation, and in this dual citizenship I must work, I must eat, I must art, I must mother, I must friend, I must listen, I must observe, constantly I must live." This strident, plaintive book introduces a major new voice in contemporary literature. Layli Long Soldier earned a BFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts and an MFA with honors from Bard College. She is the author of the chapbook Chromosomory (2010). A citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation, Long Soldier lives in Tsaile, Arizona, in the Navajo Nation.
- Author:Lavoie, ChantelSummary:
This collection offers five answers to the question its title implies: within us, in wild things, in change over time, in teething and in being left behind. Beginning in the prairies and moving both in time and direction, the poems navigate the terrors in the territories of love, faith, birth and death. The poet embraces folktales and children’s stories, the Bible and the weather, humanity’s murky past and its murkier future. Chantel Lavoie voices the fears we cherish, as well as the pain we seek, in mythologies near and far from home.
- Author:Clarke, AustinSummary:
Three Canadian soldiers awaiting deployment to Afghanistan beat a homeless man to death on the steps of their armoury after a night of heavy drinking. The poet, whose downtown Toronto home overlooks the armoury and surrounding park, describes the crime, its perpetrators, the victim, and a cast of homeless witnesses that includes the woman, a prostitute, who first alerts police. The subsequent trial evokes reflection on the immigrant experience the poet shares with one of the accused, and on the agony of that young soldier's mother. From Kandahar to Bridgetown to Mississauga, Ontario, Where the Sun Shines Best encompasses a tragedy of epic scope, a lyrical meditation on poverty, racism and war, and a powerful indictment of the ravages of imperialism.
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