Frontenac House News

Frontenac House Unveils Dektet 2010 // Apr 1, 2009

April 2010, marks the 10th anniversary of the Quartet poetry series. To celebrate, Frontenac House will simultaneously publish 10 poetry books – Dektet 2010. The titles have been chosen using a blind selection process by a jury of leading Canadian writers: bill bissett, George Elliott Clarke, and Alice Major. The jurors and publishers were impressed by both the number and quality of the submissions. Here are the final Dektet 2010 titles with comments from the jury. The official announcement will be made at 9 pm MDT, April 1st 2009 at the Quartet 2009 launch, John Dutton Theatre, Calgary Public Library.

White Shirt

“This is the ‘classic’ hard-drinking, hard-living, gravelly poet’s voice – only it comes from a woman. It’s a bust-out-of-the-closet voice where occasional touchstone rhymes and furious lists score the page. The poems are stripped down, poignant, exact, and as heartily playful as any serious blues. Here is Sappho crossed with the Supremes.”

LAURIE MACFAYDEN spent 30 years as a sports journalist, most recently at the Edmonton Journal. She left the news media in June 2007 to focus on her own independent writing and visual arts projects. This is her debut collection of poetry. A painter, poet, photographer and avid traveler, Laurie is a frequent performer on the Raving Poets’ open-mic stage in Edmonton. She is a member of the Writers Guild of Alberta, Edmonton’s Stroll of Poets and the Visual Arts Alberta Association. She grew up in southern Ontario and has lived in Edmonton since 1984.

Learning to Count

“Travel used to be a nostalgic adventure-story or anthropological ghetto of non-fiction. This book shows that the experience of crossing borders and negotiating cultures is integral to anyone alive to – and in – the world. The poems are a layered patina, evoking not only the sensual present of France, Rome, Corsica and Halifax, but also their complex pasts, interpreted over and over through art.”

DOUGLAS BURNET SMITH is the author of over a dozen books of poetry. His work has won the Malahat Review’s Long Poem Prize, and has been nominated for a Governor General’s Award and the Atlantic Poetry Prize. He has been Writer in Residence at a number of universities in Canada and the U. S., and has served as President of the League of Canadian Poets, as well as Chair of the Public Lending Right Commission of Canada. He teaches at St. Francis Xavier University, in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, and at the American University of Paris. He divides his time between Canada, France, and Argentina.

Confessions of an Empty Purse

“A book of poetry that reads compulsively like a novel – the anguished and ultimately courageous story of an individual caught between genders. The narrator is caught in the funhouse mirror of movies and pop culture, between dreams and self-loathing. These poems must be read in tandem with 1960s/70s sexual liberation classics: Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls (1966), a novel never-old, and Rosemary Daniells’ Sexual Tour of the Deep South (1974), a set of ‘happening’ poems.”

S. MCDONALD was born, raised and continues to live in Toronto. Ze grew up in pre-gentrification Cabbagetown and Regent Park. Ze has performed zir alternative spoken word performance pieces at various venues including Buddies in Bad Times Theatre’s annual Rhubarb! Festival. Ze is the love child of Christine Jorgensen & John Rechy & the spiritual godchild of Jacqueline Susann.

Fallacies of Motion

“Here is contemporary wisdom verse. Imagine ancient Solomon revived and even more cynical, witty, precise, and scathing. These lyrics are delightfully arch and delicately stern. They range from wry takes on technology and white-collar conundrums to grief and journeys.”

WILLIAM NICHOLS is a public policy consultant based in Edmonton. Born in Moose Jaw, his travels have always brought him back to the prairies. Poetry is a counterpoint to the words he produces for business and government. When words fail he likes bird watching and woodworking.

Children of Ararat

“This suite of poems addresses the legacy of the Armenian genocide. A son shaped by his father’s experience serves as witness to the aftershocks of brutality. This poet is unafraid to face the horror that is too often the result of politics and too much the truth of history.”

KEITH GAREBIAN is a widely published, award-winning freelance literary and theatre critic, biographer, and poet. Among his many awards are the Mississauga Arts Award (2000 and 2008), the Lakeshore Arts & Scarborough Arts Council Award for Poetry (2003), and a Dan Sullivan Memorial Poetry Award (2006). This is his fourth book of poetry.

Ex Nihilo

“These lyrics dare to ‘bring da noise’ – not only the funk and blues of race and sex snafus, but also the exquisite soul sound of intellectual analysis, harmonizing rhythmic lines and gritty insights. They come from a woman who knows the intricate gradations connecting black skin to white, pop culture to academia and links sophisticated analysis with the verve and drive of performance poetry.”

ADEBE D.A. is a writer living in Toronto and graduate student at York University, where she served as Assistant Editor for the arts and literary journal, Existere. Her work has been published in various North American sources, such as Canadian Woman Studies Journal, The Claremont Review, Canadian Literature and The Toronto Star. She won the Toronto Poetry Competition in 2005 to become Toronto’s first Junior Poet Laureate. Ex Nihilo is her debut collection.

Falling Blues

“Familiar comforts – marital beds, teacups – are balanced on the knife edge of language, scissored into poetic forms from villanelle to blues. The result is attentive and disconcerting. The beautiful success of this superb collection is due to the use of verbs: They are always freshly precise and colourfully sound.”

JANNIE EDWARDS was born in Durban, South Africa, in 1951 and emigrated to Canada in 1957. Her doctor father located the family to Alliance, Alberta (pop. 300). An early talker and addicted reader, Jannie was destined to become a writer and a teacher. She taught English and creative writing at Grant MacEwan College for over 25 years, and is the author of two books of poetry — The Possibilities of Thirst (1997) and Blood Opera: The Raven Tango Poems (2006).

Attenuations of Force

“This collection is framed by two powerful elegies – one, unexpectedly, for a dead pigeon and the other for a deeply loved human being. The work is informed throughout by an understanding of science and biology, the physical grounding of life transformed into poem. These lyrics are not just poems; they are exemplary. Language is lifted up, then returned to us as harmonized image and music.”

LORI CAYER’S first volume of poetry Stealing Mercury (The Muses’ Company, 2004), won the Eileen McTavish Sykes Award for Best First Book in Manitoba in 2004 and the John Hirsch Award for Most Promising Manitoba Writer in 2005. She is one of the poetry editors for CV2 and is currently serving a term as provincial representative for the League of Canadian Poets.

[sic]

“Gorilla condoms? Goldilocks’ bent-over cootchie? Gonzo cocaine? Everything’s 4-sale when language is loosed as it is ici (icy) (sic). These poems are a pile-up of pop culture at “the intersection of Art and Commerce”, and the city of Calgary is caught at the stoplight.”

Originally from Calgary, NIKKI REIMER now lives and writes in Vancouver. Her work has appeared in filling Station, Queen Street Quarterly, Prism International, BafterC and FRONT Magazine, and has also been featured in the poetry-inspired dance show “Larimer St.” performed by Decidedly Jazz Danceworks in 2005. Reimer was a founding editor of (orange) magazine, a co-editor and designer of KSW’s W12, and creator of the disjunct! performance series in Vancouver. She blogs at http://nikkireimer.com.

Standoff Terrain

“A guy looks for love in all the wrong places, but comes up with all the right lines. What happens when Sun Tzu’s The Art of War meets the Indian erotic-religious text The Kama Sutra? Well, you get philosophical verse that’s fun, frank, and funky.”

JOCKO BENOIT was born in Montreal, raised in Cape Breton and has explored the rest of Canada one university at a time until arriving in Edmonton where he lived as a poetic marauder with the Stroll of Poets. He has written one collection of poetry, An Anarchist Dream, and his poems have appeared in magazines in Canada, the U.S., England and Australia. His stories have appeared in On Spec and Tesseracts. Meanwhile, his screenplays have been shortlisted in competitions in Canada and the U.S. He lives in Calgary with his wife and son.