All Roads Lead to Manyberries
by Ron Wood
Carrying on the great tradition of Haliburton & Leacock, Ron Wood has portrayed a western small town that seems as real as it is funny.
This is what the Leacock jury said about Ron Wood’s And God Created Manyberries when it was short listed for the Stephen Leacock Memorial Award for Humour. And the same can be said of Wood’s sequel All Roads Lead to Manyberries. With sharp wit, bold characterization and a keen eye for observing what is important – and funny – to Canadians, Ron Wood once again caricatures the political leadership and the small town foibles of this country. Sounds rather Leacock-ian doesn’t it? As a former political backroom communications advisor, Wood has all the necessary scalpels. It’s easy for the reader to imagine the characters in this book with their concerns, their plots and their humorous approaches to life in a small Alberta town.
White Shirt
Laurie MacFayden navigates love, longing, lust and loss with deft wordplay and disarming wit, plumbing our most intimate relationships – those entwining family, friends, lovers and exlovers. Her rich imagery, combined with an ability to locate the extraordinary in the everyday, results in poems that range from playful to poignant as she celebrates the complexities of the human heart. In this debut collection, best friends scream downhill on their ten-speed bikes; a tree planter spells out her lover’s name in seedlings; and a mysterious entity steps out of the mist in Stanley Park. The author contemplates how best to seduce Joan of Arc and goes on an abstract-expressionist date with Jackson Pollock. Like the white shirt in the title, these poems are crisp, seductive and a little bit sweaty.
Reviews
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.
—Jury, Dektet 2010
when i first heard laurie macfayden read in edmonton, it was obvious she was a cut above the pack of poets waiting for their turn to be heard. she’s a drag queen in a pink limousine, journalist of whyte ave & the two-lane world, an important lady in an important time.
—c.r. avery
Laurie MacFayden is one of my favourite poets. Her poems vibrate with a sensorial precision that never fails to capture. From a wild date with Jackson Pollock, to poems of longing and desire, to clear-eyed rants on sexuality, she does what all great writers do – that is, she shines her incredible, unique light on what it is to be human. MacFayden pushes at the darkness with her poetry – she titillates, teases, intrigues and entertains – and I hope she keeps doing it for a very, very long time.
—Thomas Trofimuk
Standoff Terrain
by Jocko Benoit
Standoff Terrain takes its inspiration from Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. It is a book of love poems for losers, and since almost everybody has lost at love… well, this book is probably for you. In the end, these poems are about how power – and lack of power – affect who and why we love.
Reviews
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.
—Jury, Dektet 2010
In these fresh, candid poems, Jocko Benoit takes the high ideals of romance down to the streets. The republic of love is one hell of a battlefield, in Benoit’s poems, but there’s laughter here, too – Archie Bunker reading the Marquis de Sade is surely a “first” in Canadian poetry. And don’t let Benoit’s “loser-in-love” persona fool you – he doesn’t wallow in self-pity. Rather, he’s a wistfully humble student of the world, always willing to jump back into the pool even when he’s hit bottom. A collection of admirable spirit and craft.
—Jeanette Lynes
It’s hard to imagine a new twist on the dating game, but Standoff Terrain offers boy-meets-girl as a war game. Conducted to the accompaniment of pithy sayings from Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, Benoit’s poems cover all the hope and disappointment, the explorations of compatibility and its absence, involved in the militant pursuit of love. As Benoit’s would-be lovers attempt “to decide between love and / Independence”, they encounter on the one hand practitioners of S & M or an emotional scorched earth policy, but on the other hand also stumble upon surprisingly tender moments. Benoit’s wit and wry perspective keep the whole collection bubbling. The Art of War subtly reminds us that affairs of the heart, like affairs of the sword, have been a quintessential part of being human for eons. Benoit’s stunning achievement is to make it fresh one more time.
—Tom Wayman
[sic]
by Nikki Reimer
[sic] thus written, error mine. Sic to incite to attack, especially as a command to a dog: “Sic ‘em!” Siccing poetry on you. That’s sick, as in, awesome. Or ill and sickly. Either way, the (gendered, sexualized) body is implicated. [sic] re-writes a feminist lyric within the long shadow cast by neo-liberalism upon the city and its denizens, mis-remembers the lines and re-inscribes the labour and commerce and sexual negotiations that take place there.
Reviews
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 is caught at the stoplight.
—Jury, Dektet 2010
Walter Benjamin did not work at Tim Hortons. Nor did he “work at the local earl’s and never leave the neighbourhood.” But who doesn’t love cities and their edges? That doesn’t mean we have to walk around like flaneurs. Most people have to drag their bodies to work and make their bodies work. What would poetry that asks “does anybody work here?” look like, how would it make and break a sentence? What city would this poetry make its capital of modernity? How would such a poetry love a “stucco shithouse”? This is to say that Nikki Reimer’s [sic] is a book that Henri Lefebvre would love because it is wild in the way he wanted cities to be.
—Jeff Derksen
The poems in Nikki Reimer’s remarkable new book, _, stubbornly violate the breath line, salute drive-by aneurisms and prince charles maxi-pads, and take innocent testicles hostage as they expose the nostalgic underbelly of subverbia _[sic]. “Remember if there’s smoke,” Reimer cautions, as she continually unremembers the gentrified and gendered ex-city. Poetry for the reactionary-challenged; before gobbling up this yummy dirt and mucus and icing-sugar die[t], you might prefer to slap on a condom, or an extra ovum.
—Nicole Markotic
Learning to Count
In Learning to Count, Douglas Burnet Smith explores the counterpoint between everyday, often innocent, experiences and the darker elegiac tones of history. The lyricism of Tuscany’s sublime skies merges into J.M.W. Turner’s obsession with clouds and the author’s own retracing of Turner’s sources of inspiration. Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Louis Riel, Giuseppe Garibaldi, Benito Mussolini, Robert Desnos, Napoleon and a contemplative lizard on a Corsican mountainside all have their roles to play. In brutal contrast, the author, taking his own child to a school in France, encounters horrifying evidence of the murder of hundreds of children by French Nazi collaborators. But throughout, Smith measures the impact of his encounters with distinctly Canadian insight and awareness. And so finally the journey returns home, to Canada, to Halifax, Nova Scotia, where Pablo Picasso magically leads a naked chorus line through the streets of the city. The journey has been exhilarating, exhausting, at times almost unbearable – but always, always magical.
Reviews
Travel writing 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.
—Jury, Dektet 2010
Falling Blues
Falling Blues sings about edges and air, about fear, about letting go, jumping, plunging. The poems chart some of the many ways we have of falling in and out (of love, of lines), of falling for and under (spells, sinners, mystics), of falling off and down and getting back up and on again. It`s about what throws and carries us, what we are given, what we learn and what – and who – we take with us on the vertiginous journey through the body`s mischief, to the stillness we imagine lies beyond falling.
Reviews
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, always freshly precise and colourfully sound.
—Jury, Dektet 2010
Fallacies of Motion
These poems were taken from a diary of poems and sketches kept over forty years. In retrospect they have a repeating pattern of awareness and lack of awareness, of uncomfortably being in society and more comfortably slipping back to be in nature. When analysis fails, as it always does, the poet slips back again inside his skin. It is a journey to no place except home.
Reviews
Here is contemporary wisdom in 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 introspective riffs on grief, loss and the compensations of travel.
—Jury, Dektet 2010
William Nichols has created a series of poems here that challenge readers to re-examine their views of the most fundamental of relationships – those between us and all living things. Whether they are in our human existence or in the natural world surrounding us, the reader will soon recognize the broad convergence employed to appreciate the transitory nature of all living things. Human pack rats, stray dogs and damaged, doomed shorebirds find their way into our consciousnesses. Nichols’ poems are neither obsequious nor sentimental. His long- practiced objectivity finds its way through the inner worlds of reactionaries, bureaucrats and magpies, as he shares this storehouse of observations. There is a long vision to this work.
— Dean Morrison McKenzie
ex nihilo
by Adebe D. A.
Reviews
Ex Nihilo is a bold, beautiful, and timely collection of poetry. Deeply imbued with a rhythm as deep as Langston’s rivers, Adebe D.A. choreographs her words to dance on and off the page — her canvas. A remarkable remix of language and history, Ex Nihilo moves us to places we have not yet considered. A call to both thought and action, Adebe confronts and celebrates her polychromatism. She is a major voice of a new generation.
—M.K. Asante, Jr.
At once bristling and lyrical, intimate and political, Adebe’s persona in this courageous debut collection of poems vacillates between seemingly irreconcilable poses: artist and academic, activist and sensualist, innovator and traditionalist. As she confesses in the poem “Colour Lessons”, she’d like to be everything. Herein the reader will discover the richness of mixed legacies, competing voices, and the joys and burdens that come with them.
— Priscila Uppal
The poems delight in the play of line against idea in a vexed terrain of politics and feeling; history and the contemporary search here for new images. A poet of great promise.
—Leslie Sanders
Ex Nihilo troubles the waters of identity, opens the borders of literary precedence and official “canon” and is straight from the hip. It is fierce, streetwise poetry, with “a beauty of incongruence.”
—Anne Waldman
These lyrics dare to “bring da noise” – not only the funk and blues of race 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.
—Dektet Jury
Confessions of an Empty Purse
by S. McDonald
confessions of an empty purse is a poetic transmemoir of passion and fear, laughter, nightmares and dysphoria, preservation, degradation, dreams and pride … and it really happened. I was – am – there.
Reviews
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 Daniell’s Sexual Tour of the Deep South (1974), a set of “happening” poems.
—Jury, Dektet 2010
In these street-wandering confessions, McDonald explores the interstices of gender, perception, and image, floating freely between the depths of narrative and the butterfly brevity of poetry. Here is a text where bodies are mapped onto memories, in turn mapped back onto bodies, a palimpsestic circulation that sometimes storytells, sometimes startles, and always spills its truth, a purse overturned on a page.
—Ashok Mathur
Children of Ararat
Reviews
This is a momentous collection rendered by a poet in his prime. Children of Ararat takes the reader on a harrowing journey beginning with the Armenian Genocide of 1915 and continuing on to the denial that lingers to this day. While the horror is made clear, there is something oddly joyful in the mourning, in the poet’s ability to give voice to the long-dead. Without hyperbole, the poet evokes the gruesome events and articulates how, as the inheritor of his father’s experiences, he finds himself ‘trapped in an abyss’ created nearly a century ago. As with his previous collection, Blue: The Derek Jarman Poems, Garebian once again creates a living elegy that at times reaches almost beyond words.
—Jeff Round, www.jeffreyround.com
It’s a passionate and angry collection of poems focusing on the massacre of ethnic Armenians in Turkey in June, 1915. …The book, though, is more than a catalogue of atrocities….the book opens with a selection of poems that reflect on his father’s story, ‘the whole mad history of it.’ Other poems explore the effects of the genocide on the survivors and on the descendants of victims. Garebian also comments on how the genocide has affected artists of Armenian descent and their works: the paintings of Arshile Gorky, the plays of William Saroyan, and the films of Atom Egoyan…The writing is evocative and full of powerful images. Sometimes, as Garebian describes, the whole landscape answered in pain: ‘Between the staked olive trees, the partridge/caught their spurs in wires/wrenching the skies with cries.’
—Quentin Mills-Fenn, Uptown Magazine, Winnipeg
If we put our ears to the ground, we will hear “death by wholesale subtraction,” we will hear the story of shoes lost and the sounds of shoes boiling. We will hear the powerful passionate voice of Keith Garebian who will not be silenced and whose tongue “licks the caves where the dead lie in hibernation.”
—Joy Kogawa
In Children of Ararat, Keith Garebian, relentlessly and with an optic heart, pursues the suffering of the victims, exposes historical hypocrisies, and pleads with the world to acknowledge the truth about that dark chapter in the lives of his people. The Armenian genocide has certainly stung Garebian into poetry. These poems are a splendid memorial which will continue to haunt the reader long after he has put them aside.
—Henry Beissel
Rage, for it to work on the page, requires a control so stern it seems like ease of phrase; historical pain made personal cannot be made convincing without such control and craft as is found in these poems by Keith Garebian.
—Barry Callaghan
If you want to feel how deeply a genocidal history can impact the imagination, read these brave, passionate, relentless and incandescent poems by Keith Garebian.
—Peter Balakian
Children of Ararat 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.
—Jury, Dektet 2010
Attenuations of Force
by Lori Cayer
Reviews
Attenuations of Force is a collection that commands our attention. Unnerving and charming in turns and at all points, linguistically supple, Cayer’s fierce, unflinching poems of selves made and unmade, of postmodern lusts and blind faith, will torque your brain around. Whether Cayer is mapping a weather that “drums your body apart” or riffing off a neo-gothic Jeff Goldblum morphing into a fly, her poetic altered states and stated alterations will dazzle you. No question, Cayer means business.”
—Jeanette Lynes
Lori Cayer’s poetry soars and dives among tempests of desire, death, love and loss, pulling readers/listeners into the vortex of the storm and leaving us breathless in its aftermath. Her poems are merciless in their hunt for prey, from domestic minutia to the fluid flow of maelstroms. A father’s knife “so thin it hums in the hand.” A tornado pulling a ponytail into “whirligig, exclamation point, drill bit, blender. Attenuations of Force is tremor and aftershock, a howl into the wind, an unzipping of language.
—Mari-Lou Rowley
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.
—Jury, Dektet 2010
Amazing Flights and Flyers
“Some accomplishments seem to be beyond human endurance, such as the two mid-winter medical evacuation flights pioneered by the intrepid crew of Kenn Borek Air; the continuing efforts by volunteers from CASARA to search for lost people and planes; the determination of aviation pioneers who fight to fly the volatile conditions experienced in our Maritime provinces; the amazing lifestyles of those who choose to live in the Far North and never want to leave.
On the other side of the flying field are those who used flight as an opportunity for personal escapes or hijacking capers, or whose fates were suddenly decided by bad luck – engine failure, sudden weather changes, or chances taken with unfamiliar machines and terrain. A high-risk wartime story chronicles the attempt of enemy forces to dock their U-boat on Canadian soil to install a weather reporting station. All are remarkable stories, and most are little-known.
Flight can be a combination of thrills beyond compare – and sudden full stops. The stories in Amazing Flights and Flyers encapsulate nearly every human emotion and scenario, and range from the early days of the 20th century to the present.” —From the introduction to Amazing Flights and Flyers
Wait Until Late Afternoon
OR distilled, decanted and debauched
by David Bateman and Hiromi Goto
David Bateman and Hiromi Goto’s collaborative poem, Wait Until Late Afternoon, is a nostalgic/anti-nostalgic creative autobiographical conversation. Tracing their relationship to their fathers, their lives, and to each other through the transfiguring effects of alcohol, the narrative travels from glamorous nightclubs and the Jade Market in Taipei to Peterborough, Ontario and Nanton, Alberta. Through memory, mourning, geographies and sexualities, this poetic narrative is at once a memento mori and meditations upon wabi sabi.
Reviews
Bateman and Goto share these pages with a tipsy, razor-edged humility. Intriguing, painful, funny and moving, these poems speak to each other in a conversation that seduced me like a row of glittering, multi-coloured cocktails. You can’t just have one… I downed the whole book in one sitting. — Evalyn Parry
Fix yourself a big Manhattan (rye, not bourbon), then sit in your favourite chair as far as possible from the dirty dishes, and read your way through this lyric conversation. Hear it aloud inside your barely sober head. These are words you can give yourself to with confidence, they are that precise and that evocative. — George Bowering
Moon Nibbler: The Art of Pat Strakowski
by Andrew Oko
Photography by John W. Heintz
Pat Strakowski, working over a period of approximately three decades, has produced a body of totally original work that is unique when measured against almost any artistic or cultural standard. Her sculptures – created from papier-maché adorned by found objects as varied as ancient Japanese coins, Mexican ceremonial trinkets and wasps’ nests from the local neighbourhood – have few parallels in any artistic tradition.
Strange creatures abound in the artistic world of Pat Strakowski. Warriors sprout deer horns to enhance their communication with the gods. Cats with serpent tails guard the household, lurking beneath the staircase to attack intruders. Deformed angels mourn the agonies of war. A young girl, suspended perpetually in mid-air, performs timeless skipping rituals. A birdlike creature, screaming in anguish, removes its own head – but maybe it’s not in anguish after all; perhaps it’s all about imagination pondering freedom from heavy loads.
By placing Strakowski’s work in the perspective of myth in the contemporary world, Andrew Oko has developed insights that would not be possible simply by observing the sculptures by themselves, without reference points. Drawing on the ideas of thinkers as diverse as Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida and Aldona Jonaitis, Oko has created a framework that greatly enhances even a casual appreciation of the art underlying the art of Pat Strakowski.
Complementing Oko’s study and analysis, the sensitive photographs taken by John W. Heintz constitute an innovative pictorial study that is a creative achievement in its own right.
details from the edge of the village
Pierrette Requier’s first book of poems, details from the edge of the village, offers a single stunning narrative arc that is novelistic in its sweep. A bilingual component merges northern Alberta French seamlessly into the flow as she embraces two centuries through the telling.
Awards/Award Nominations
Pierrette Requier Nominated for the Edmonton Book Prize
Reviews
Pierrette Requier wears the MaGarrigle sister’s ballet slippers rather than cork boots when she’s log rolling through the jams. She mixes French language bon mots and family chestnuts with English language in a Peace country memoir melange. Ms. Requier’s poems are primarily anecdotal or descriptive remembrances, and display the loving attention to language that western haibun poet/authors employ in reverence to Basho’s perennial classic travel diary Narrow Road to the Interior. Rich is a word I find myself reaching for, or sumptuous. Not in the sense of Rococo filigree or brittle marzipan, but in the sense of good country macrame´: knotted and beautifully homespun and functional:…This book has all the virtues of a compelling memoir; it’s firmly rooted in place and times; slowly an loving places the pointillist dots, draws the reader into the family circle, growing up rural French in north-central Alberta; clearly delineates the family dramas, sisterly secrets, adolescent fantasies, rites of passage. - Richard Stevenson
…the use of the present tense and exacting detail give these poems a hyper-realistic effect, such as you might experience when viewing cinéma-vérité or the paintings of Chuck Close….
It’s almost eerie how immediately the poet is able to place her reader within the living minutiae of her book’s private history. One thing that creates this verisimilitude is the naturalistic pacing of her writing; another, strangely enough, is a perfectly digestible amount of bilingualism. It lends a texture of specificity to the work, the unpredictable truths of the real world creeping in again, something that happens on multiple levels, creating layers of colour and credibility…” – Globe & Mail
Alberta’s Peace country, on the farm and into the intermingled lives of a huge family – these prose poems are wonderful places to be, the characters delightful to meet. The details bring forth a ring of truth. A family’s story is presented in the same fashion a great cook concocts a fine stew. Complicated, full of amazing ingredients from the home garden. Delicious. —Andy Michaelson
Pierrette’s work is about speaking from the margins – from the almost forgotten fringes of French on the northern prairies, and from the liminal lingual space where English and French talk to each other. Her poems come from these edges but speak to the heart. —Alice Major, Edmonton’s first Poet Laureate
Samples
Mom’s Maman
Eyes bewildered stroke struck and propped up fatly she sits on Her narrow bed in a narrow room as our sad Mom brushes her Long disheveled hair we three good little girls in our Sunday Best in this stuffy curtains-drawn sick room watch the only sound a half suppressed sigh as if Mom had been crying a long time as she takes that one last look we take leave
Fifth World Drum
We’re all familiar with the First World of capitalist nations, the Second World of communism and the Third World of poor and underdeveloped countries. In 1974, Shuswap Chief George Manuel published The Fourth World: an Indian Reality in recognition of the third of the world population of indigenous peoples who don’t fit, and aren’t recognized, within the model of the Three Worlds. To these, Sewell adds a Fifth World, for those, like her, whose heritage crosses between worlds.
Reviews
Anna Marie Sewell’s debut collection is a horse of a different colour, clambers to a clatter of different hooves with equal élan. A more performance-based, declamatory poetry, sometimes – with a wicked back beat born of the age of rock ‘n’ roll, Nuyirican, slam, Beat, and aboriginal ghost dance trance… Not the kitschy aboriginal rattles and moccasin soft-shoe of urban aboriginal after pre-European roots, but the real mean deal: of the land but not denying cityscape and multi-media, multi-ethnicity…Matrilineally of Slavic descent; a Status Indian whose aboriginal heritage comes from a First Nation to which she does not officially belong, Ms. Sewell has developed the slinky moves to slide like smoke over or under most barricades. I particularly like her suite of poems set in Korea, where the social observer and elfin dancer both step lightly through the morass. - Richard Stevenson
Throughout this book, Sewell shines as a poet. The content is what drew me, but her delivery and skill are what kept me revisiting the work. Her poems will appeal to anyone who has ever walked a bridge between two cultures, as well as to readers in love with strong diction, or a well-placed word on the page… Fifth World Drum reminds me that our stories are worth telling even if we can never know all the words. ~ Cara-Lyn Morgan The Malahat Review
Re: the poem “Thunderstorms.” I kept returning to its carnality, its cancer scars, its phantom cannibals living in the outhouse, its unbridled Freudian mayhem. Raw, wide-eyed and palpably electric, this is wonderful stuff, and I look forward to reading more of it from Anna Marie Sewell. – Globe & Mail
Poet Anna Marie Sewell, when asked where she is from, responds, “There are so many true answers.” Her answers are delivered in lines of poetry that resonate like musical notes, chords, drum beats and rattles. In an increasingly populous and multicultural world where bureaucratic forces doggedly prescribe categories to human diversity and expression, Anna Marie dismantles these false social constructions of personal identity and human capacity through language that is variously inventive, clear and soulful, and through image that is whimsical and highly imaginative. The seeker in these poems surveys lands, cultures and belief systems in Japan, China, Korea, Mexico and Canada, particularly Aboriginal “Canada” with a vision that is uncompromisingly original. —Marilyn Dumont
Anna Marie Sewell is a wanderer. With grace and warmth, she explores “a world I know as solid and strong, a territory of new possibilities.” As an indigenous poet with Mi’gmaq roots, and Slavic relatives too, Sewell moves easily across the cultural borderlines that inhibit other people. Her poems drift from the warm kitchens of Eskasoni, to the prairies outside Saskatoon at twilight; from a dusty road to the pow-wow at Poundmaker’s, to a moonlit skinny dip in the Okanagan. Everywhere she goes, she searches for unlikely intersections, and she finds them. I love Sewell’s poems because she describes the Canada I crave – intimate, beautiful, brave, forgiving. —Linda Goyette
Untitled Child
In her third collection of poems, Nancy Jo Cullen once again turns her questing and multidimensional mind to the nature of madness, addiction, impermanence and loss. This confessional collection takes an unflinching look at the path of a life’s destruction to create a harrowing chronicle of bereavement. As Zoe Whittall says, “Nancy Jo Cullen gets to the guts of grief, revealing its complexity with wit and poetic precision.”
In 2006 Nancy Jo Cullen’s life partner died after a long struggle with mental illness and addiction. Untitled Child examines the trajectory of the end of the marriage between the two women and the author tries to understand her role in a series of painful events.
The poems are confessional in the vein of poets such as Anne Sexton. Cullen tries to get inside the skin of the mess of what once appeared to be the perfectly suburban life. Untitled Child is part memoir, part rant and part lament as Cullen examines the rage, grief and surprise about the terrible havoc that addiction can reap on a life.
Reviews
Nancy Jo Cullen’s Untitled Child pushes the linguistic possibilities of the post-modern lyric with intriguing and powerful results…the book gingerly avoids the standard pitfalls of maudlin self-pity and sensational confessionalism through clever deconstruction of its own narrative structure and musical/linguistic leaps of diction, register, tone and its side-of-the-mouth use of allusion. Critical language melds with lyric tropes, and droll delivery with understatement and the quick, deft cutaway. I wouldn’t say that Ms. Cullen is a language poet, but her work is informed as much by that post-modern set of stratagems as it is by imagism or high realism…She’s never totally abstract or abstruse and she never sacrifices the music to the matter-of-fact tone or droll delivery. Her poetry offers good clean fun, even when dealing with painful subject matter. - Richard Stevenson
Reading Cullen’s poems is a little like drinking booze. Definitely not wine, because it’s not all that genteel, and not beer, because it’s not all that commonplace, but hard liquor because it’s edgy, fast-acting, more than a little disorienting and frequently mixed with something sweet…Cullen understands how we are entertained by our emotions, and this poetry is trained like a laser scope on our limbic systems. – Globe & Mail
Samples
Wherefore fly
Those were the days of holding on When omnipotence was a tree When heaven died Such a province of no geography Where the dead pray For pre-emptive action Unto the well endowed earthly As if defenses could cultivate desire When the narrow sky was located And we named it Communicate
Tanka
It almost broke me when you couldn’t fix yourself. But ain’t that Shakespeare, or it’s Buddah’s First Noble Truth. I thought you were untamed But you were nightshade.
Things that Matter Now
Things that Matter Now examines how reactions to persons and events change with age; how memories lose their power to control; how there is choice in those things one reacts to – in short, the things that matter now.
Reviews
Bob Stallworthy’s work is more firmly entrenched in the Modernist traditions of imagism, objectivism and anecdotal realism. This is Mr. Stallworthy’s third collection with Frontenac, his fourth over all, and a much more laconic stripped and kinetic, energetic poetry runs between the boards here. He’s even adopted the proprioceptive tricks of early Creeley and George Bowering…occasionally explodes the Gutenberg margins in favour of open form, drop lines, multiple margins – in short a much terser, more rhythmic, linguistically minimalist approach is at work here….This one is unquestionably his finest collection to date. It’s not just the mature subject matter – but the delivery – wit, rueful sense of humourm phrasing, stripped away of ornament – often nail an observation with just the right amount of metaphoric leavening. - Richard Stevenson
his style is … almost immediately between W.C. Williams’s imagist austerity and Milton Acorn’s boisterous narrative style…Stallworthy shares the islander’s gift for letting the physicality of things tell their stories… The strongest poems here engage the reader head on; like Dickens’s ghosts, they can show you someone else’s life and trick you into examining your own. – Globe & Mail
“I’ve read Bob Stallworthy as a poet for over a decade. This is his best work. Bob has had the courage to grow as an artist, not to repeat his past successes, but to build on them – to leave the things that do not need to be written about behind, and go towards the present and lived moments of his life. In this book is the writing of a man who has found and accepted his power in the world. And, like anyone who understands his own influence in things, Bob writes with humility and confidence combined. I think that is the beginning of wisdom. And it is here.” — Richard Harrison
“In his powerful new book Things that Matter Now, Stallworthy tackles the big questions of death, love, and time with a grace and bravery that command us to read on. Whether he is writing of his aging parents (or their deaths), his own mortality, or the death of friends, he always gets the human magnitude of it just right. One of my favourite moments is when he voices our shared longing to bring back the exact colours to memories muted to grey. Many of these poems, while set vividly in the present, reveal deep roots. This is a commanding and moving book that I will not soon forget.” — Robert Hilles
Pavlov’s Elephant
In a deft dance of word and form, Rosalee van Stelten evokes landscape and spectacle, sadness and laughter, romance and adventure, and displays an overarching empathy with our world, its creatures great and small.
Pavlov’s Elephant continues the themes Rosalee developed so successfully in Pattern of Genes: the lasting lessons of childhood that go on to shape an entire life; the warmth of family; the keen observations of the world around her; the pleasures of travel. And always there is the keen delight in words and the ingenious use of rhyme and rhythm that infuse every page throughout the book. Pavlov’s Elephant is easily accessible and a pleasure to read, but leaves a strong impression not easily forgotten.
Reviews
“Van Stelten has a wonderful way of weaving together story, place and language. One is quickly drawn into her poems and always rewarded.”
Hazel Hutchins, author of After
Breathing Stone: Contemporary Haida Argillite Sculpture
by Carol Sheehan
Photography by Jack Litrell and John W. Heintz
Breathing Stone presents extraordinary new sculptures by contemporary argillite artists of Haida Gwaii- the Queen Charlotte Islands.
Breathing Stone begins with author Carol Sheehan’s introduction to Haida culture and the historical realities that have shaped this unique art form. There is also an explanation of how argillite sculpture is produced and how it can best be appreciated. Personal portraits of 15 sculptors and their work, illustrated by nearly 200 colour photographs taken in artists’ workshops, galleries, collectors’ homes and on-site in Haida Gwaii, demonstrate like nothing else the power and richness of this art form.
Download the sample pages. The sample pages are for personal enjoyment only. All images are copyright © Frontenac House; all text is copyright © Carol Sheehan. Neither may be used without permission.
The artists of Breathing Stone are:
- Sean Brennan
- Michael Brown
- Donnie Edenshaw*
- Shaun Edgars
- Chris Russ
- Gary Minaker Russ
- Marcel Russ
- Lionel Samuels
- Jay Simeon
- Robert Vogstad
- Darrell White
- Gryn White
- Martin Williams
- Cooper Wilson*
- Freddie Wilson*
(*) Featured in the sample pages
she is reading her blanket with her hands
I am humbled by the women and girls in my world, and I thank the great spirit for their presence. my métis grandmother, germaine proulx-boyce, taught me to embroider, to work with ribbon. I’m told I have hers and exilda dufort-lafrance, my great-great grandmother. I’ve passed these hands to my daughter, barb, and to my granddaughters, jessinia and mazie. these hands of mine love to write, and I’m told my great grandmother, rosina lafrance-proulx, was a poet, that she talked to the trees, to the plants and animals. and now she talks to me. more than fifteen years ago, rosina’s voice in mine, I woke up to the words “she is reading her blanket with her hands,” the birthing of the poems in this book.
Reviews
Sharron Proulx-Turner’s book she is reading her blanket with her hands encompasses love and death, journeys and discoveries. It is a powerful work dedicated to family and friends and reads like a mother’s song to her children, the way in which a mother will say listen, the way a mother will hope and dream. The book is also a dedication to women: the victimized, the paralyzed and the empowered.” ~ Mary Barnes, Prairie Fire
Sharron Proulx-Turner mixes an amiable prose with a verse so free it gets downright trickstery to unfold the small talk impulses behind the familial and the familiar into songs and meditations, prayers and autobiography. In the process, her notes dedicated to family and friends also reveal and revel in large chunks of the Canadian landscape and re-inscribe in those natural places figures that history erased, the figure of the particular contemporary Metis girl, woman, mother and grandmother she herself was and is, sitting centred on the blanket and “inviting anyone awake/ to take the chance/a lifetime of dreaming our selves/one small bird at a time.” ~Daniel David Moses
Samples
one crow sorrow two crows joy
for joy hendrickson-turner
green in the hills
like lines in a long & sensuous poem
each one a careful reflection of the next
sisters walking & something about crows & sand & clams & black bear beach, about rapid rivers & rivers wide as lakes. these were the beauties for us, the peace. the sand from the beach, coarse & hot & cleans the feet in seconds. acorns from a grandmother oak, leaves bigger than men’s hands. those great trees, the oaks & the maples & the white pines, growing in our backyard, our schoolyard & us playing marbles in the sand, making necklaces from pine needles, elegant & long. climbing trees. hiding in the bushes. kick the can all the way through to the big kids’ school.
we’ve walked together in all weather
in blizzards, laughing in the cold
in hail, running for shelter
in the company of birds
crows & hawks & ravens
magpies & whiskeyjacks & geese
osprey in the hot, hot sun
& chickadees in the bitter cold
we’ve walked through the chill of our childhoods
& into a prairie meadow
filled with the healing power of sage
of sweetgrass all around
& there your beauty
is intensified by your smile
your most excellent sense of humour
I remember when you were born
your smell after coming home from hospital
the smell of new life
of what joy can mean
in an embodied way
if I were to express my love for you, I would walk with you on the side of a mountain, the snow deep & us pumping our way from camera to tree, camera to tree, trying to take a photo, our footprints deep & slow & our laughter all around. the air there, in those mountains, has a quality that’s hard to describe – an intelligence & a voice, a story. & the two mountains with us in the photo, like sisters reflected in each other’s home.
high on a mountain
laughing
where a single moment
is worth more
in that instant
than years of not knowing
blood rushes to my fingers and the frozen blanket’s off the line
remembering joan marguerite boyce-turner, 1932-1986 they say it's hard to talk about death sometimes it's hard to talk about life death's a new beginning my mother isn't good to me when she's alive she doesn't like me right from the start she doesn't like me she says I try to kill her from in her womb tells anyone who'll listen I'm the biggest born a fat baby goat's milk bread and sugar's how I stay that way too slow for cow's milk is what they say soft in the head I'm the slowest to walk the slowest to talk I'm toilet trained very young and then begin to dirty my drawers again so I'm put back on the diapers I wear a diaper and suck a soother till I'm in school I'm beaten a lot and raped by many men and women and that's not just the half of it my mother says she destroys my childhood pictures as they come along some say I make that up and rip them up myself it's not true though so I never see a picture of that fat baby or the crosseyed girl with crooked teeth they are close my family thing is the closeness is unhealthy keeps the cocoon brilliant with its own poison my family touches wrong there's no telling who'll blackout and go hogwild there's one thing about my family though never a dull moment sharp knives maybe but never a dull moment because I see my family that way as a mass of bone and fibre and light for my kids and their kids' kids I stop the drinking the violence the incest not that I stop going there every sunday like a sun dial when my mother is alive I cook I clean take care of the kids and make sure the breakables are out of the way of the adults thing is I'm not no saint you understand no angel either but by golly gee holy smokes I'm workin’ on stuff and that there's one weird family I come from my mother phones me twice in my adult life the second time she calls she can't stop choking she quits smoking about six years or so before that's about the same time she switches from beer to rum and coke drinks to blackout she's at work when she calls she's crying and sounds scared and scary at the same time I go and pick her up and take her to her doctor this is a friday sunday she has emergency surgery they're going to remove her left lung they close her up after they open her and there's nothing there but cancer she's very ill from then on dies eight months later two days before my mother calls me up and choking I call her up to tell her today I'm leaving my husband so while my mother's dying I'm feeling pretty good and I feel guilty and ashamed and happier than I ever felt in my life not that I wish death on my mother but the knowing is so delicious so liberating I can see her dying every day after a few months she wants me to go to her house and clean every second day which I do she wants me with her when she goes to chemo she wants me to help her pick out scarves to cover her baldness she wants me to get her tea she wants me to feed her she wants me to soothe and swab the open sores inside her mouth she wants me to sing to her she wants me to massage her when she smells of cancer and morphine and death and her bones are her only curves and then her bones get the cancer too too painful to the touch and then her brain and then her brain forgets to tell her body what to do forgets to tell her body how to take her into death any day now the hospital folks say any day now day after day after day after day I love my mother for a long time after her death I'm sick with hurt and glee and anger and grief not any more though then this summer my mother comes to me in a dream she tells me she is different she can help me now she says she can come to me like my grandmothers I am not too comfortable with this so I frame a photo of my mom when she is just a girl a picture at her first foster home behind her left lung there's laundry on the line abuse and fear and danger that's just hangin out to dry
Water Strider
Water Strider speaks of tensions, surfaces and dualities. It is about our jerky imperfect pairings: with our parents, siblings, lovers; with our pasts and our landscapes; with language, memory, and longing; and with our elusive and illusory selves. It explores the fragility of narrative and perception, the dicey boundaries that are part of love and identity, and the thin membrane between anguish and humour.
Awards/Award Nominations
Shortlisted for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize
Reviews
With unflinching elegance, Hofmann surprises the reader with her seemingly fearless confrontations with mortality…charging each poem with a type of dark and enigmatic sophistication. ~ J. Mae Barizo, Matrix Magazine
Probing, spare, acutely angled and scrupulously nuanced, Karen Hofmann’s poems are as surprising as the remarkable arthropods invoked by the title poem. ~Don McKay
With intense acuity, Hofmann charts the many ways we walk through this world wounded. Her stories and her images are as exquisite as they are unnerving. ~Donna Kane
Wiser Pills
The joke used to go, “Wiser Pills: take just one and you’ll be wiser,” as the cynical victimizer offered a rabbit raisin to the callow youth. From rabbit raisins to psychedelics, the edict of better living through chemistry had Sixties boomer kids dropping this, smoking that, snorting something else, or poking it directly into their veins to grow taller, get smaller… . Join poet Richard Stevenson on his own exploration of the rabbit warren of consciousness from childhood rites of passage, through dumb jobs, to middle age complacency as the perimeter of that age-old symbol of acquisitiveness, the immaculate lawn, grows smaller and smaller and the poet’s wry grin grows wider…
Reviews
Rich metaphors … a distinct voice … the reader hangs off the crispness of each word. ~ Vernon Mooers, Writer’s Lifeline
Richard Stevenson gives expression to our alter ego: It’s the part of us that wants to be oblivious to social norms; the part driven to tell it like it is, with street smarts and a limber tongue. ~ Lori Lavallee, Lethbridge Insider
…a forceful combination of narrative and lyric styles that successfully portray the several seasons of being male. ~ Matthew Manera, The Canadian Forum
Stevenson is adept at making his own poetic windows, framing experience and impression with a feel for how words sound and images might be perceived. … His often off-kilter takes on things are permeated with a gently rueful sense of humour. ~ Valerie Warder, NeWest Review
Autopsy of a Turvy World
Sheri-D Wilson, winner of the 2005 WGA Stephan G Stephansson award for best book of poetry, presents a scalpel-sharp view of 21st century afflictions such as noise pollution, airport security, and fast food encounters. A shocking and wildly funny book.
Reviews
Wilson and her work are both entertaining and visionary. The pieces often feature the voices of women, creating a space for the expression and exploration of the female perspective. ~Queens Quarterly
Samples
I Visited The Bridge Of Your Ghost On A Full Moon Morning
Today, I came to visit the bridge of your ghost like a monument built over mortality and the weeds and the flowers grow below the solid line, like capsized dreams. And I came to the water’s edge where they left you face down in the mud, drowned and clubbed to death. When I was down there the groundskeeper came by, to say a mother duck laid her eggs just inches from where they left your life behind for less than a song. Underneath the wooden bridge— what the hell went wrong, all graffiti skulls and half-sprayed words under there, on the cement wall pylon beside the place where they kicked and you crawled— I sing to you. I sing to you a lullaby—sense of senselessness fills up in hollow blue hue questioning why, why you? Under a noisy wooden bridge planks and beams shudder and quake, above my head, rush-hour retreads, snakes over. I take digital vigil snaps of your beautiful imaginary body, invisible outline wraps around the tide here still like a flower, a water flower where you laid to rest your final breath, and I can hear you here, beg for mercy I can hear you here clear as spiritual bells ring in a bowl. Past midnight, a meteorite, you write prayers across the sky. I want you to know, I sing to you in praise, and I hope you might hear me as the night heard you cry, through the wooden bridge above, like a racket, rattle dust overhead. Was it heaven you thought you heard above you, like a calling overhead circling like vulture-angels’ tell-tale tattle, and the herring in the water still and the heron’s priested shore, and the gates open above the bridge to the other side where you might live again? Gates where you might live again in your teenaged body like a long note of stolen youth and eyes of naked wonder, body unlocked to love and all the births you might’ve had. The streets grow quiet and the ducks brood on their eggs and all that remains of life is death and memory and ghosts and my song humming still humming along— Today, I came to visit the bridge of your ghost where people cross everyday on their way in and out of their lives en route over bones, sticks and stones cockle shells, easy ivy over. The sacrifice of a flower and a heron and a weed and a clam and a blackberry bush, and a final hour. Crow calls to me and I try to understand without meaning. Reason is a name on a gravestone I once saw. Light breaks and when does hatred rest— and the wash of excitement and the rush of relief and the disbelief that they actually killed you with sticks and stones, and they did break your teenaged bones and their names will always hurt me.
Ma and Tight Corners: Tipsy Curvy
“It goes like stink!” ~ Ma, 1969 It was a turquoise 1957 Chevy with the truck engine. And Ma would drive that old jalopy around corners, hell bent like a Formula One demon on speed, and she’d yell, Hang on! We’d be in the back seat changing from our school clothes into our brownie uniforms, and she’d take the corner with a fighting spirit, on two wheels, and we’d hang onto the seats for dear life, gripping with our fingertips till our lips turned psych ward white, and then both car doors on one side would fly open, no holy shit handles we’d hang on to that front seat with the fake fur seat-covers so we didn’t go flying out… …and then the corner would be over and the heavy ’57 Chevy doors would come flying shut. Bang! Bang! And we’d go back to changing our clothes and eating our Kentucky Fried Chicken right out of the barrel, like pros, finger lickin’ good; before seat belts, and car seats and sun block and water wings. Way back when they’d give us matches to play with and guns to shoot the bottles lined up on the fence for fun. Back when you could ride without a helmet, feel the wind in your hair. Because of Ma I’ve never been afraid of the dark. She taught me how to stay on my toes, how to dance with danger. And she’s funny. Damn, she’s funny. Always makes me laugh. Sometimes it scares me when I think I might be exactly like her.
Maverick in the Sky
Aviation adventures are Shirlee Smith Matheson’s specialty. In Maverick in the Sky the author paints a fascinating portrait of flying ace Freddie McCall, one of the most successful fighter pilots of World War I.
McCall’s bold spirit might well have been inherited from his clan motto Dulce Periculum – Danger is Sweet. His amazing wartime accomplishments, his extraordinary flying skills, his fiercely independent barnstorming character and his self-reliant entrepreneurial spirit make him one of Canada’s most spectacular mavericks.
The exciting story of this true Canadian hero comes to life on every page of this book.
Reviews
Maverick in the Sky is one of those books you can’t put down and I read it in one sitting. I was thrilled to “sit alongside” Freddy in his adventures — the stories just tumble out of the book — they will amaze & thrill you. ~Denny May, In Formation
“Captain Freddie McCall is a true Canadian hero, and Shirlee Smith Matheson’s book Maverick in the Sky is a testament to his superb airmanship, courage and daring. Canada produced the best pilots on the western front, and McCall was truly one of our very best. With 37 confirmed victories, including 14 kills in just six days (which is apparently a record for all pilots in World War I), McCall’s story is told here in vivid detail. How many pilots can say they were decorated not only by the Prince of Wales, but King George V himself? Freddie McCall can and you’ll hear all about it in this outstanding book. Highly recommended.” ~Roger Thompson, M.A., Author of Lessons Not Learned: The U.S. Navy’s Status Quo Culture and Brown Shoes, Black Shoes, and Felt Slippers: Parochialism and the Evolution of the Post-War U.S. Navy
And God Created Manyberries
by Ron Wood
Fictional political satire, written in the form of tongue-in-cheek banter in a small-town prairie saloon. The result is a refreshing antidote to political correctness, sloppy thinking and lazy journalism.
Synopsis: The Ranchmen’s saloon in the Alberta hamlet of Manyberries, is home to some of the shrewdest political discussion in Canada.
On the surface, a bunch of old-timers are sitting around drinking beer and complaining about taxes and the government. But first impressions are deceptive – this is not mere tavern talk. Listen more closely and you’ll find scalpel-sharp dissections of double-talk, political correctness, hypocrisy and lazy thinking. Nobody is spared: inept and uncaring governments, both federal and provincial; self-serving politicians demanding credit and glory without having earned it; everyday guys who always want more than their share and more than they give; and members of the media whose stock in trade is trivia at the expense of real news.
And beyond the political parables, there is a unique menagerie of genuinely memorable characters. They’ll drive you half mad with their double standards and crazy schemes, but they’re irresistible in their humanity. By the end of the book you’ll feel you know them better than your own family.
Awards/Award Nominations
Shortlisted: Howard O’Hagan Award for Short Fiction
Shortlisted: Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal
Reviews
“This book will leave Canadians – but most especially our so-called ‘leaders’ – howling. Some with laughter, others with indignation.” - Mike Duffy, CTV News
“Like an episode of Corner Gas or a story from Stuart McLean’s Vinyl Café, Manyberries is small-town Canada in all its glory. It’s an entertaining read.” - Jane Taber, Globe & Mail
“A veteran of the media and political wars, Ron Wood has put his sharp wit and astute observation skills into this clever collection of stories. It’s an amusing read from a guy who has combined humour and satire like no one else.” - Dave Rutherford, QR77
Rhyming Wranglers
by Ken Mitchell (Editor)
There is a cultural movement sweeping the Western plains like a prairie fire: cowboy poetry. In gatherings and festivals from Fort Qu’Appelle to Pincher Creek, from Maple Creek to Stony Plain (and beyond), cowboy poets are chanting the praises of the ranching culture as never before.
In Rhyming Wranglers, you will meet men who are “double damn tough” and women who are even tougher. You will find plenty to laugh about from “The day Leonard taught me to chew snuff” by Denis Nagel, to Neil Meili’s “The Old Dry Guy and the Bath”. The whole spectrum of range life is presented: the clamour and danger of a cattle stampede; the fragrant beauty of a prairie night; the unexpected loss of a loved one. And there’s a lot of cowboy philosophy here too, from the no-nonsense creed of Robert Service’s “The Quitter” to the subtler values of Sid Marty’s deeply moving “The Rider with Good Hands”.
Rhyming Wranglers includes not only poets from pioneer times, and the current stars of the cowboy poetry festival circuit, but such major outlaw poets as Sheri-D Wilson, Sid Marty, Doris Daley and Corb Lund. You will find they all speak the authentic lingo of the cowboy.
Rhyming Wranglers/Contemporary Contributors (in order of appearance):
HARVEY MAWSON – A retired cowboy who makes his home at Dundurn, Saskatchwan where his family has been ranching for five generations, Harvey is the author of several books of poetry, notably Brimstone and Bobwire, and a book of short fiction, Cowboy Up, Rodeo Stories.
W.J. “ROBBIE” ROBERTSON – A retired RCMP staff sergeant (after 40 years’ service), Robbie Robertson enjoys nothing more than reciting poems in his 1896 NWMP period uniform. He has appeared on CBC and CTV, and has performed all over the world, ranging far from his High River, Alberta home.
FRANK GLEESON – Frank Gleeson is a cattleman and poet who operates the Lone Birch Ranch at Williams Lake, B.C. (with his wife Betty). He has appeared at many poetry festivals across Canada and the U.S., including the big gathering at Elko.
ROSE BIBBY – Rose Bibby performs at many gatherings with husband Garth, travelling from their home at Westlock, Alberta. She is the author of several booklets including Rosebriar Ranch Ramblings and Rosie’s Rhyme and Reason and an audio tape, Hayshakers “Live” at the Bluff.
BOYD TAYLOR – Boyd Taylor grew up on a family farm in Saskatchewan. After a long career as a teacher, he retired to ride horses and write cowboy poetry¸ “because it speaks to the real events and people of the West, using a combination of truth, myth, and humour.”
DORIS BIRCHAM – Doris Bircham has been partnered with the same man, same ranch, same prairie wind forever. Author of a book of poems, Teamwork, she has been a performer and organizer at the Maple Creek Cowboy Poetry Gathering since it began 14 years ago.
SID MARTY – Born in England, Sid Marty grew up in Medicine Hat, and worked on horseback for many years as a National Park warden in Alberta and B.C. Author of two poetry books, Headwaters and Sky Humour, he has also published major works of nonfiction about his beloved Rocky Mountains.
DORIS DALEY – Proclaimed “queen of cowboy poets”, Doris Daley has produced four poetry books and a CD, Poetry in Motion. Doris comes from a gene pool of “ranchers, cowboys, Mounties, good cooks, sorry team ropers, Irish stowaways, bushwhackers, liars, two-steppers and saskatoon pickers.”
LEE BELLOWS – Lee rode bull, worked as a rodeo clown and barrel man at the Calgary Stampede and Canadian Western Agribition, and now works as a district livestock inspector in Saskatchewan when he isn’t performing cowboy poetry at every event within riding distance.
NEIL MEILI – Neil Meili published his first book of verse, Cowboys, Poets, and Pilots, in 1995 with the New Texas Press, Austin, Texas, where he was a director of the Austin International Poetry Festival. He has published 16 books of poetry since, and takes part in poetry strolls and gatherings across the continent.
KEN MITCHELL – Ken Mitchell, story-teller¸ playwright, poet and actor was awarded the Order of Canada for his efforts in “promoting Canadian literature at home and abroad.” Most recently, he participated in the Cucalambe Festival of Country Music and Poetry in Las Tunas, Cuba.
THELMA POIRER – Thelma Poirier belongs to a horse-ranching dynasty that goes back to pioneer days, and has spent a lifetime raising cattle in the rangeland around Wood Mountain, Saskatchewan. Thelma represented Canada at the Elko gathering in 1992, and has returned many times since.
ANDREW SUKNASKI – A leading poet of the Western Canada literary renaissance, Andy Suknaski has had a long and productive literary career. He won international acclaim with Wood Mountain Poems, edited by Al Purdy, and has since published many more books of verse.
MARK ELFORD – McCord, Saskatchewan rancher Mark Elford is also a musical performer. “The Great Divide”, written as a tribute to his father who died shortly after Mark’s brother Wes was killed, was performed by the country-gospel band Family Reunion and recorded as an audio cassette.
JUDY HOPKINS – Judy Hopkins recently performed at the Royal Saskatchewan Museum’s Cowboy Poetry Festival in Regina. Her self-published book Fed From Different Streams appeared in 2000. It included “Wonder Dog”, a sly testimony to the poetic naming of animals.
DAVE PRATT – Dave Pratt, a Cree-Dakota has worked across Canada and the U.S. as a rodeo rider and cowboy. The title poem of his first book, A Cowboy Rides Away, was dedicated to his friend Lionel Poitras, a Cree-born RCMP officer who was killed at a rodeo.
MIKE PUHALLO – Now a cattle rancher, Mike Puhallo became a rodeo cowboy at the age of 16 and rode the circuit for over 20 years. He has published three volumes of cowboy verse: Rhymes on the Range, Still Rhymin’ on the Range, and Can’t Stop Rhymin’ on the Range.
ANNE SLADE – Ann Slade wrote Denim, Felt and Leather and co-wrote Pastures, Ponies and Pals (book and tape) , and A Voice of Her Own. All three poems in Rhyming Wranglers appeared in Bards in the Saddle, a collection of the Alberta Cowboy Poetry Association published in 1997.
BRYN THIESSEN – Bryn is a popular preacher and veteran performer whose distinctive handlebar moustache – 16 inches from tip to tip – is much-admired at cowboy poetry events throughout the west. “The Prairie Breeze” appeared in his illustrated collection Wind in the Pines.
PHYLLIS RATHWELL – Phyllis raises cattle near Rockglen, Saskatchewan, where she is also a school principal. She claims to be “equally (in)competent at workin’ cattle, checkin’ pens, fencin’, balin’, cussin’ gates an’ ridin’ the grub line.” She produced a tape, Three Babes On A Bale with Terri Mason and Doris Daley.
WAYNE“SLIM” MITCHELL – Slim Mitchell grew up and still lives on the XM Bar ranch near Moose Jaw. He began performing as a Stompin’ Tom Connors impersonator, took up cowboy poetry, and appeared at many cowboy poetry events, usually with Bill Gomersall and the Mitchell Boys.
SHERI-D WILSON – Probably the most radical cowboy poet in Canada, sheri-d wilson is a writer and actor who has electrified audiences everywhere. The author of six books of poetry and a CD, she has won every major performance poetry contest including the title of Heavyweight of Poetry, USA.
DENIS NAGEL – Denis Nagel, now a veterinarian, grew up on a farm and worked many years on cattle ranches. “The Day Leonard Taught me to Chew Snuff”, his first published poem, is homage to his early mentor Leonard Swanson, a rough-and-ready wrangler from the hills.
CORB LUND – Corb Lund and The Hurtin’ Albertans have toured Australia, Europe and the U.S. They won a “Roots and Traditional Album of the Year” Juno in 2006 and were featured in Universal Pictures’ “Slither”. Before moving to Edmonton, Corb rode, herded, and rodeoed for several years.
Reviews
The best cowboy poetry I’ve read speaks poignantly – if with the delightful country corniness, and insouciant joy and humour – of a justly celebrated but vanishing ranching way of life. ..Ken Mitchell’s accomplishment here then is considerable. He’s given us a chronology of the cowboy poetry sub-genre, reaching back to nineteenth and early twentieth century archival cowboy verse, and placed it where it belongs in the tradition of light verse narrative, ballad, tall tale, shaggy dog story, folk yarn; even gone so far as to show a continuum between what we would recognize as folk art – comparable say to old painted milk pails and weathered door mirrors and wagon wheel driveway markers or chandeliers – and verse satire or truly western rural free verse.
Several of the poets represented are seasoned veterans of the cowboy poetry festival circuit – Elko, Pincher Creek, Maple Creek, etc. – and evince considerable skill with accentual syllabics, wit, timing, and delivery. What we don’t get in indirection and metaphor we get in spades in hyperbole, ironic leg-pulls, wry (rye?) wit and humour. You’ll smile a lot reading this book, and, occasionally, break out into lusty guffaws. ~ Richard Stevenson, PoetryReviews.ca
Looking for a little cowboy poetry to recite around your backyard fire pit? A new volume of verse about life on the range and the wide-open prairie can help you on your way. Ken Mitchell has selected works from 40 poets in his volume titled Rhyming Wranglers — Cowboy Poets of the Canadian West.
Mitchell’s roots are in ranching, like so many of the poets whose work he lassoed for this project. He grew up on a ranch near Moose Jaw, Sask., then hung up his cowboy hat in the city where he taught English at the University of Regina. A playwright, actor and novelist, he has more than 25 books to his name… This is a fine collection of lines that beg to be read or sung aloud. That’s one of the draws of this genre — it really is meant to be shared. ~ Claire Young, The Calgary Herald
She Dreams in Red
She Dreams in Red is the story of journeys – from China to Canada, to Indonesia, to Mongolia into the mysteries of the human heart and romantic relationships.
Exploring the author’s unique cultural background and history, travels and encounters with love and loss, these poems attempt to make sense of the world with simple images painted in clean brushstrokes.
Reviews
Kienlen writes knowingly of Chinese Cafes, splendid meals, a barely acknowledged grandfather’s wife left in China and racism, of the words that “slapped my mother’s face.” These poems live in a world of secrets and legends and what she takes from the past. ~ Bill Robertson, Star Phoenix
Plenty to admire in the brevity and close observation of domestic and travelogue detail, the handling of colloquial speech rhythms and phrasing. ~ Richard Stevenson, Northern Poetry Review
Impersonating Flowers
Rated PG, these poems loosely chart an adolescence – moving swiftly into middle age – experienced without parental guidance. As the poet morphs from poodle to petal, finding solace in Haiku (and other profound decorative forms) he considers a timeless revisionist anecdote – When he was just a little girl he said to his mother, “What will I be?”
Impersonating Flowers answers some of the questions his mother was afraid to ask.
Reviews
Hang onto your hat: it’s a wild ride, hetero or gay; poetry shouldn’t be so much fun! ~ Richard Stevenson, Northern Poetry Review
Contrary Infatuations
Contrary Infatuations is a collection of lyrical snapshots that take the reader to familiar places of both heartbreak and celebration. Whether chronicling the mucky reality of a lone woman working in the oil and gas sector or describing the wounds of widowhood there is a reverence for the natural world and an underlying theme of hope.
Awards/Award Nominations
Shortlisted: Gerald Lampert Award
Shortlisted: Stephan G. Stephansson Award for Poetry
Reviews
Whether writing about the hard scrabble life of being a camp cook or documenting a long and harrowing bedside vigil beside her husband; whether writing about working in the oil patch, about being “ bushed,” or juggling wolves in a primarily male industry, she never succumbs to sentimentality or maudlin self-pity. Indeed, it is the upbeat character, the wit and good humour the poet brings to her candid observations that impresses most:
Her preferred mode is the skinny free verse strophe, she’s terse and economical with the language, even in the narrative pieces, and can string together a strong developmental suite, as she does in Camp Cook, Tree Planting Poems , The Patch Poems, 2006, and the stellar centerpiece, Astrocytoma. Her work poems bring to the familiar anecdotal narrative sub-genre a wry wit, strong use of anaphora and other parallel structures, so she can ring the changes from straight reportage to metaphor with élan. A solid debut. ~ Richard Stevenson, Northern Poetry Review
The Bride Anthology
The ways of love are long and torturous. They include the ability to start over after things have blown up as well as the fine art of remembering the good times and forgetting the bad. Sometimes we need an old, never-married aunt to bring us back to an understanding of where true love resides. Or a Catullus who keeps on redefining what the ideal love relationship is. Or someone who has loved too fast and too furiously. The convoluted paths of love never fail to beguile. Catch this poet as she runs after the fickleness of love and longing.
Reviews
The Bride Anthology is as tasty as it gets in Canada, and the poet is as adept with a strophe as she is with a distich. Indeed, Rivera uses all the resources of the poet with equal aplomb: recurrent motifs and cognate imagery at the atomic level; tropes and schemes at the sub-atomic level. It’s a rich collection and one I’m likely to return to to sip at awhile in the shade. ~ Richard Stevenson, Northern Poetry Review
In Silhouette: Profiles of Alberta Writers
As Bob Stallworthy’s writing career grew and as his involvement with the Writers Guild of Alberta also grew, it occurred to him that there were a lot of writers working in the province who didn’t know about each other. This was particularly evident within the Guild as it began to increase in membership. He volunteered to write “profiles” of members for the Guild’s newsletter/magazine, WestWord. In Silhouette collects these and other new profiles in one place, the rationale for this e-book being that, if individual writers are still not sure who else is working in Alberta as a writer, the chances are pretty good that non-writers will not know either.
The criterion for inclusion is, at a minimum, having at least one book, fiction, non-fiction, poetry, or children’s work, published by a recognized publisher. Almost all people profiled live in Alberta. You will find a few who live outside the province who, nevertheless, built much of their career while living here. They are all hard working writers. Some you have already met through reading their work. Many, you may not have met before. It is our great pleasure to introduce you to them.
(Note: You will need Adobe Acrobat Reader or similar software to read the e-book. To avoid compatibility problems, you should also have the latest version of the software.)
Current Profiles:
New profiles added July 28, 2010.
- Timothy Anderson
- John Ballem
- Marty Chan
- Joan Crate
- Paulette Dubé
- Dave Duncan
- Cheryl Foggo
- Fil Fraser
- Cecelia Frey
- Richard Harrison
- Greg Hollingshead
- Faye Reinberg Holt
- Hazel Hutchins
- Marie Jakober
- Myrna Kostash
- Robert Kroetsch
- Alice Major
- Sid Marty [new]
- Shirlee Smith Matheson
- Suzette Mayr
- George Melnyk
- Don Meredith
- Tololwa Mollel
- Sarah Murphy
- Michael Penny
- Roberta Rees
- Ken Rivard
- Gail Sidonie Sobat
- Fred Stenson
- Richard Stevenson
- Aritha van Herk
- Tom Wayman
- Lyle Weis
- Sheri-D Wilson
- Christopher Wiseman
- Mary Woodbury
Bios
For more bios of Alberta Writers, visit our online Alberta Writers Directory.
Taqsim
by Zaid Shlah
A taqsim is an improvisational Middle Eastern medley in which the musician moves between formal musical structure and free-flowing improvisation. In Taqsim Zaid Shlah writes within the formal structure of the lyric, but incorporates an innovative lyricism that agitates between his Iraqi and Canadian heritage: a history of music, food, war and love in a space as wide as the mountains and prairies of his native Alberta to as far away as the land between the two rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates.
Awards/Award Nominations
Shortlisted for Alberta Book Awards - Book Cover
Reviews
Taqsim is an insightful and complex book of poetry rooted in tradition and yet branching out into the new and unknown. ~ Kindah Mardam Bey
Personals by Chris Jennings
Shlah successfully weaves the stuff of history, familial memories, landscape, even cuisine into his poetry, performing a kind of word jazz that improvises on the blue notes of recent Iraqi history and the rich madrigals of his mother’s remembered speech. He riffs on his unique place in the world, the double vision afforded by one who grieves the narrative forced on his countrymen by Bush’s fundamentalist Christian warriors, and speculates on the demise of the Western empire, wondering where it is, and how it is a man in such an imperfect fragmented, post-Modern world is to make his stand; and how he can find solace in the family that carries such inestimable baggage. ~ Richard Stevenson, The Danforth Review
Zaid Shlah’s poetry is as “multifoliate” as Yeats’ rose in its blending of contemporary voice with the ancient traditions of Iraqi and Arabic poetry and music. He is as much at home with the expansive Qasida tradition as with the work of Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and Derek Walcott. Richly lyrical and sensual (“the apple tree promenading its / red treasure, and twig-light just coming on”), his work brings us to a world that feels immediately familiar because so close to the mind’s famous eye. ~ Paul Hoover
Zaid Shlah’s Taqsim sings! This book’s gripping melancholy and unique resonance in the face of departure and loss is tough and exciting, it tells us to “leave the river, leave the grass, leave the gaze….the words rooting in your eyes, leave the sun…its lie – go and be something beautiful.” Shlah takes us to the radiance of Arab history, cultures, religions while “driving along Highway 22X, South of Calgary, having much less to do with [the] place, than with the story growing inside it.” These poems confess and connect us to the turbulent mystery of beauty and the quiet voice of the world. ~ Nathalie Handal
This is a book of love poems by a man who knows the body can be as “sweet as dates”; it’s a book of philosophical poems by a man who knows how hard Heidegger can make you work and do nothing at the same time. This is a book of songs by a writer who wants you to hear his Arab words side by side with his English ones. And it is a book of political poems because this is a book by a man who knows that poets work with their hearts wide open, and in obscene times they must both protest obscenity and affirm the sacredness of human life with every bit of vehement love at their command. ~ Richard Harrison
A Summer Father
When her father Major John Jarmain died in the Battle of Normandy on June 26, 1944, Joanna Weston was six years old. A book of Jarmain’s poetry was published in 1945 and Joanna read the poems again and again over the years in an attempt to get to know the man behind the words. Her own book of poems, A Summer Father, gives us a poignant portrait of her absent father and her own war-marred childhood.
Reviews
“poignant and spare in all the good ways” ~ Richard Stevenson, The Danforth Review
Today’s war in Afghanistan with Canadian Soldiers fighting on he front lines (and sometimes dying in action) gives this book a special relevancy and a poignancy that it wouldn’t have had even five years ago.
Any Canadian soldier currently in Afghanistan will be fortunate indeed if 50 or 60 years from now a poetic descendant remembers that soldier as eloquently as Joanna M. Weston has remembered her own “summer father”. ~ Rob MacLeod, Canadian Bookseller
Impressively moving poems. ~ Alex Rettie, Alberta Views
Bulletin from the low light
by J. Fisher
Written in the low light glow of a borrowed laptop, J. Fisher’s bulletin from the low light leaves the blinds open and lets the world that lives on the streets below his window slip in. To the shadows that find that window he gives voice as blogs posted where there is enough light to see them. Frontenac’s first blog book from fisher’s popular blog of the same name is an electronic experiment — a seamy and uncompromising take on modern city street life and the author’s own demons. Poems from the blog have been taken up by publications as far afield as Germany’s Mon(u)ment and as close to home as Victoria’s Street Newz.
Reviews
The collection concentrates mostly on the streets of a downtown core with a few scenes thrown in from the poet’s rural home town. The poems are occasionally humourous, always honest and raw and brutally fearless. The honesty and experience of the poet’s voice becomes an activism on behalf of the souls that make up the street. He moves from full participant to latent observer in a matter of words. ~ Robyn Maharaj, Prairie Books Now
J. Fisher’s poetry, repulsive and compelling, describes life as a car wreck. bulletin from the low light is ugly and uncomfortable — the fix when the fun is lost. J. is a busy writer, a jaded drunk and a fearless documenter of his world. These poems are self-aware and charged with politics and grief. Don’t buy this book if you want to feel good at its end; do buy it, however, if you’re interested in the heart-felt work of a writer willing to represent the invisible and ignored, the human face of lousy bars, street life and addiction. The work of J. Fisher is situated at the intersection of f***-all avenue and nothing street and it’s definitely worth a visit. ~Nancy Jo Cullen
Samples
Visit the bulletin online
http://jfisher.frontenachouse.com/
Alberta Anthology 2006
by Allan Boss (Editor)
This book contains stories, essays, poems and dramatic monologues by some of Alberta’s best writers. The pieces are far ranging in their subject matter, from relationship narratives to insights about landscape, from rainy day noir to futuristic card games, from the power of chocolate to reflections on art and identity. It is safe to say you can expect the unexpected.
These pieces illustrate the broad range of talent in Alberta and show the many paths writers can take during their lives. There are three youth winners, including a story written by an 11-year-old. There are 16 Amateur winners, and as many Professionals. The judges were Albertan writers respected around the world: Governor General’s award winning writers Sharon Pollock (Dramatic Monologue), E.D. Blodgett (Poetry & Poetic Prose), Gloria Sawai (Short Story), and GG nominated writer Aritha van Herk (Creative Nonfiction). Here it is possible to see that a youth writer can become an amateur, then a professional, and perhaps one day a GG winner.
The entries are all 1250 words or under and are perfect for short reads during a bus trip or at lunchtime or just before bed. Many you might want to read again and again. Dip into this superb collection of writing that exposes the wealth of talent, ability, and artistry that exists in Alberta.
Reviews
Excerpts from Richard Stevenson’s review in The Danforth Review:
The standout story is first-place professional winner Leslie Greentree’s “The Brilliant Save,” about amateur hockey heroics and male braggadocio: how the guy who can stop a puck with his tough exterior becomes a metaphor for a life cut short by adolescent bravado…the story is terse and economical, handling the conventions of the Freytag triangle with wit and grace.
Professional first-place winner Rebecca Bradley turns in the standout performance with her “Wedding in Sepia,” a meditation on a wedding picture, circa 1911, Calgary, which makes much of body language, eye contact, and poise and pose to adumbrate the lacunae in Victorian manners and behavioral/dress codes, and speculate from empirical evidence on future relations.
Second Place, Professional Category winner Caterina Edwards offers a similarly laconic, masterful piece of retrospective narration that contrasts a little girl’s perceptions to the larger movements of history. The timing is perfect and the control of colloquial speech rhythms and the Mother Goose melodies of children’s sentence inflections note perfect.
Editor A.G. Boss kicks off the dramatic monologue section with a piece of his own, “Reflecting Reason,” as if to set the tone or show the others how such a marvel of concision can be constructed… It’s a clever, witty piece, a kind of cartoonish fractured fairy tale.
A strong collection of Alberta voices. ~ Bryn Evans, Alberta Views
Tear Down
by Ali Riley
A disgruntled Disney™ employee, a Spanish mystic and a fever-ridden Supervixen are a few of the tenants of Tear Down. An assemblage of myth, architectural narrative and trigger-tale, the collection draws inspiration from Catholic saints, garage bands, the Seven African Powers, performance art, and the history of lipstick. Whether its characters are fasting in the desert, casting spells in suburban kitchens, or losing an eye in the gender wars, Tear Down takes a wry and visionary look at impermanence, the meaning of home, and finding solace in a fallen world.
Reviews
The trajectory of Riley’s poetry has yet to come close to its peak. This book is a necessary exploration without severing her roots: a fine, complex work. ~Andrew Vaisius, Prairie Fire Magazine
Riley has a wonderful ear for rhythm and tempo. The impact of her poetry comes almost entirely from her perfect control of tone. ~Alex Rettie, Alberta Views
Tear Down consists of intimate, sharp-edged poems that pry open women’s inner lives, veering between quick-tongued, confessional-style lyrics and something much more open in form. Riley’s work is sassy, fun and dangerous: much more like New York than like the rural locales she’s lived in lately. ~Lee Shedden, Calgary Herald
Riley fuses pageantry with sound, she contrasts the urban landscape of drug dealing and petty crime with the Waldron Pond gone wrong rural scene. Her poetic Third Eye shifts from snapshot to prose poem to cinema veritee documentary. ~Anne Burke, Prairie Journal
Referencing such unlikely bedfellows as Kafka and Patti Smith, Zarathustra, St. John and The Silver Jews, Riley, reliable trafficker of the sweet unexpected, will not be pinned down. These are poems alive and pulsing as desire. ~Laurie Fuhr, Fast Forward Magazine
Pearl
Pearl is a poetic exploration of the life of the legendary Pearl Miller, early Calgary’s most famous, and successful madam. Cullen fuses traditional lyric lines and experimental uses of form and language to fabricate a biography of Calgary’s mythical brothel keeper.
Awards/Award Nominations
Winner: Alberta Book Awards Trade Fiction Book Award
Shortlisted for the The City of Calgary W.O. Mitchell Book Prize
Reviews
Cullen has a delicious way with words that can be both biting and tender at times; Cullen has made a complex web of poetry to examine a complex woman in history. ~Kindah Mardam Bey, AnE Vibe
Cullen’s soft intense writing works without straining to impress. ~Alex Rettie, Alberta Views
“I find Pearl’s story emblematic of the renegade individualism Alberta claims to love,” Cullen writes in the introduction. Perhaps not surprisingly, though, Miller’s story isn’t well known; madams aren’t the kind of maverick the chamber of commerce celebrates. ~Lee Shedden, Calgary Herald
Like Atwoods’s Alias Grace the poet draws on true crime. With a legendary madam for inspiration, she explores the economic, sexist and psychological factors involved in the World’s Oldest Profession. Cullen culls phrases from a Modern Typewriting Manual of Office Procedures, the Penal Code, the Madam’s Little Black Book of Johns and a mock will, as well as Miller’s prison records to establish the authentic documentary purpose of the book. ~Anne Burke, Prairie Journal
Pearl spirals down to a series of epithets on the pillars of Miller’s life, much as it must have done years ago. Here, “whore” is tragic, solipsistic, business. Cullen has crafted a naked work and requiem of uncommon truth. ~Bryn Evans, Fast Forward Magazine
Samples
Relief
The roaring twenties shuddered to a halt on the heels of the Spanish Flu The wind having blown farms to dust and boys and soldiers back to the city Calgary grew up fast through drought, grasshopper plague, wheat rust & sawfly A city without a drink to offer the law-abiding brokenhearted Being fed one square meal a day, divided into three portions The talk among the indigent turned to revolution The trade of token services for relief encouraged entertainment The most ambitious sort including a good fuck and some whiskey Hard times we laughed in the small bedrooms allotted to our services Hard, hard times.
Grace
Let us not look at ourselves differently. Let us embrace disappointment Lo, our companion all these many years. And when we meet our Maker Let us not forget ourselves In obsequious acquiescence In pastoral reflection Let us embrace the vengeful Creator Whose wrath and eccentricity Casts a light upon our own Let us hold the grudge close to our chests While we lie in the bed of our own making Brimming with remorse and resisting Forgiveness and all it requires of us Amen
The Lightness Which Is Our World, Seen from Afar
A deserted woman has an affair with a Hindu god while her husband lusts for jewels that are guarded by cobras. A widower retraces the last European holiday he took with his wife. Excursions are made into the personal and political absurdities of language and naming. Whether it’s a bus tour in Mumbai, a café stop in Lausanne, or a sunset walk along the Bay of Bengal—Ven Begamudré’s journeys are filled with longing, desire and a tenderness that persists beyond reason. This is The Lightness Which Is Our World, Seen from Afar.
Awards/Award Nominations
Shortlisted in the Saskatchewan Book Awards
Reviews
Renaming Stillness and Travel by Antje M. Rauwerda
Begamudré‘s style is fluid, engaging and rhetorically compelling…again and again I am reminded of Eliot’s contention that poetry is indeed a “superior entertainment.” ~Paul Vermeesch, The Globe and Mail
Begamudré’s lush rolling cadences bring to mind those of Michael Ondaatje or Anne Michaels while evoking a mythical India and a modern Europe. ~Lee Shedden, Calgary Herald
Begamudré is successful at knowing how to write even as he exploits his journey towards knowing how to live. ~Anne Burke, Prairie Journal
Begamudré weaves bright threads of experience into the rich tapestry of his verse, dyed berry and rust by the organic colour palate only available to one who has actually been there. A fantastic debut. ~Laurie Fuhr, Fast Forward Magazine
A Bad Year for Journalists
by Lisa Pasold
Pop music jingles, statistics, the frames of text and camera selecting the world’s headlines for our perusal. A stroll along the Champs Elysees jammed against the slum of Kibera — A Bad Year for Journalists feeds the jagged, seductive language of media into the emotional cusinart lives of the media’s flawed and courageous practitioners. To say
what it was
not what it was like.
Awards/Award Nominations
Shortlisted for Alberta Book Awards Trade Fiction Book Award
Reviews
Renaming Stillness and Travel by Antje M. Rauwerda
By turns sympathetic, critical, darkly funny and painstakingly lyrical, the poems trace journalistic travels in the Middle East – “places at their best dismantled” – and overlay the national and geographical settings with characters and anecdotes so vivid the reader feels as if she might be at home in these places after all… In an increasingly hyperbolic idiom where everything is so conveniently unspeakable, Pasold speaks up, conveying more than impressions or exaggerations; these poems explain “what it was/ not what it was like”. ~Katia Grubisic, The Globe and Mail
Pasold has an unusual ability to paint a whole emotional world. It’s impossible to pluck a Pasold line out of context to show what I mean — her work is just too organic. You’ll have to read the whole book, and you’ll be glad you did. ~Alex Rettie, Alberta Views
A Bad Year for Journalists, in hard lines and fragmented images, evokes the bizarre world of international journalists: the surreal combination of danger and privilege that they embody and their tourist-but-not tourist relationship to the places they cover. ~Lee Shedden, Calgary Herald
A compelling cartography of war torn territory. ~Anne Burke, Prairie Journal
Pasold sneaks in mind’s-eye metaphors and images, the poems carefully structured and solid, belying their driving narrative – she weaves disjointed memories, from rusty jeeps to lust to typewriter. A thrilling, amazing work. ~Bryn Evans, Fast Forward Magazine
Samples
Kinshasa (hands on the steering wheel)
darkly she can be ok casual for days then suddenly on Thursday, eyes broken windshields behind sunglasses, driving towards Kinshasa in a ’72 Mercedes listening to Lionel Ritchie. each body a separate statistic. collateral damage she adds up the numbers, makes the phone calls from what’s left of. plaits her hair, swats flies. define wounded. define this a finger at the latest checkpoint. keeps it discreet. those polite requests for better funding, flights to Paris: ivory, coffee, ghosts. once she caught the stewardess’s eye you can see them too, huh, didn’t say anything. the unexpected she takes into her mouth, files the photos. harder to believe in, get so tired of falling asleep. overnight kit missing ground sheet & sleeping bag what the fuck is that about, she keeps going. maybe it won’t end. maybe it will never end. she drives as if her mouth is filling with shards of ice
what’s possible
“Hidden agendas: How journalists influence the news”
she reads. that’s just fan-tas-tic, I knew they’d get
to blaming us one of these days.
it’s a simple job, “radicalizing the pain of others.” Or selling it.
because she's there to make money off their situation. at least,
they think she is.
can you sell this?
so they throw shit at the car. their own shit. towards her.
splatter the windshield.
(if she worked, say, for FOX, she could skip
this, make it up as she went along. like whistling a tune.)
where’s her handy pith helmet and guidebook? in the Strand once
she came across Directions for Englishmen
Going to India. 19th century binding opened in her hand
to page 41. Bodoni Book font, smudged advice:
"Stand still and wave a white handkerchief. This should
confuse the elephant."
there was no illustration.
but the handkerchief remains, the elephant pauses
to decipher meaning
—truce? surrender? you're
about to blow your nose?—the elephant’s hesitation
an opportunity:
Run. Run away.
Keep driving, she says now from the passenger seat.
Just keep driving.
Clarence’s Engine
by Trudy Cowan and Noel Lukasewich (Illustrator)
When Senator Lougheed moves his family to their new sandstone house in 1891, six year old Clarence loses his favourite toy train. Through the engaging story of his search, and vivid full colour illustrations, the reader explores the beautiful, historic Lougheed House, and also learns a great deal about life in the frontier town of Calgary.
Clarence’s Engine is the first in a series of Historical Tales from Lougheed House
Visit the Lougheed House website to read more about this famous building, to find out about school tours and to participate in ongoing events.
Reviews
This book is most suitable for children in Grade 3 or 4 who can compare their present experience with the author’s carefully researched description of a move at the end of the 19th century. Teachers with students of that age will enjoy using it in their classrooms. Parent and grandparents might read it with grandchildren to begin a conversation about ways Alberta and the world has changed in the last century. ~Dianne Linden, Legacy
Samples
Clarence twisted around and looked back…
Clarence twisted around and looked back to watch their old house getting smaller and smaller in the distance as they rode to the far end of Stephen Avenue. Then, they turned a corner and the old house was gone. The boy turned around and looked ahead, over the heads of the horses, through the steam from their heavy breathing rising into the cold, late afternoon air.
He looked around as the buggy made its way out of town, left the hard-packed streets and bumped over a rough trail across the prairie grass. They were moving to their new house. He had been told that much already. The idea of a new house was quite exciting. But as they got further and further from town, Clarence got worried. There were no other houses. If there were no other houses there would be no other children. Who would he play with? Without other boys and girls living nearby, he’d always have to look after little Norman, his two-year old brother. Oh my. He wasn’t looking forward to that.
Re:Zoom
- Re:Zoom – a book of no return.
How can we return?
We resume,
but never from where we left off.
We continue from
some other place.
Awards/Award Nominations
Winner: Stephan G. Stephansson Award for Poetry
Reviews
Wilson’s content treks across diverse plains — lost lovers, animal rights, poet bill bissett — and her experimental form differentiates this book from many released this spring. Not only does language undergo a makeover — verbatim becomes “ver-beat-him” — but the structure is shaken up, with stanzas diced and parsed and entire sections capitalized to emphasize a found memory. … Re:Zoom’s best pieces [shine] with such poetic light that it’s hard not to listen to wilson’s unique voice. ~David Silverberg, Quill and Quire
sheri-d wilson’s reputation as a wisecracking woman’s wisdom-peddling performance poet remains intact with her latest collection of poetry, Re:Zoom, in which she charts her familiar territory of near misses in love, sticking-out-her-tongue rants at authority, sardonic description of bad ex-boyfriends, and effusive praise songs for the spiritual and the feminine. ~Sonnet L’Abbe, The Globe and Mail
Calgary’s sheri-d wilson creates poetry definitely for adult sensibilities and has carved a niche for herself as one of Canada’s most consistently daring, progressive and experimental poets. Constantly striving to challenge the whole art of verse construction, Re:Zoom is a self avowed departure volume which deconstructs the lives, loves and roles of women in modern Canuck society. ~Gilbert A. Bouchard, Edmonton Journal
Re:Zoom (resume, re-zoom, etc) is vintage Sheri-D Wilson…. Sheri-D manages to skewer or lance most of [her] targets with the poniard point of her acid pen. ~Richard Stevenson, The Danforth Review
sheri-d wilson’s literary voice shows us that the best poetry is even closer to dance than to music – the physicality of words in motion. The poetry of Re:Zoom explores the marriage of body, emotion, ideas, language, and the sheer beauty of sass. ~Lillian Allen
sheri-d wilson is one of the finest poets in Canada, if not the world, including Vancouver. She can take an old tired adage, and make it jump down your throat into your heart and then further down into your very soul, the darkness where sexuality pulls at you and prods you to react to what she is saying. Re:Zoom will make you reconsider many things, perhaps beginning with what poetry is and what it can do to enrich your life. As she writes in a piece called “Re:finery of Bella Donna”…come shake my chandelier! ~Jann Arden
Samples
Re:member Snapshot
What does it mean when you take in a roll of thirty-six shots and they only develop eleven? I don’t know I guess some didn’t turn out Maybe they were over-exposed What does it mean when you start the roll with one love and end the roll with another? I don’t know I guess some didn’t turn out Maybe they were over-exposed What does it mean when you have two loves on the same roll and you’re not with either of them anymore? I don’t know I guess some didn’t turn out Maybe they were over-exposed Did you drop your camera? No, I wasted my film and I hate it when people charge me for exposing blanks
Re:call Five Old Biddies on a Fifty
in memory of Henrietta Muir Edwards, Irene Parlby, Nellie McClung, Louise McKinney, Emily Murphy Five old biddies on a fifty dollar bill, of XXchange BNA 24, DNA underscore, famous five penta-live, quinquagesima – women made of bronze strive for realm of gold fit, their circle into a square hold their pose reform prose, into memory goes rustlessness, impermeable we have walked among them by them, around them and they have walked through, talked to, us given us names, faces they have given us traces of identity, history, hers herstory, all races, women stand together, this day, strong we have recognized their chairs and their table, admired their hats wondered what they were thinking tête-à-tête, heart-to-heart rat-ta-ta-tat, over pink tea conspirators of change, up rise free, we have stopped to witness their four seasons of courtly XXchange their circle in a square, we have stopped to watch nature rearrange snow shawl crystals into frozen furs that settle on their shoulders to warm winter, westerly women eyes dare the full moon night, to be as full and wise as it might dream to be May spring bring sundial on rotary phone call home, pray, summer summon fall, recall tone ring, ring/ring, ring/equality high-five the famous five for women are persons fight for the right to be seen and heard vote, for sight to be seen run for Parliament, libertine women are persons heavenly spheres past prejudice and strangling fears women are persons out of silence into voice, rejoice Five old biddies on a fifty nifty fifty-dollar bill 50 notes past fear divided by five that’s two fivers, ten bucks each that’s 10 times one hundred cents which is one thousand cents, 10 bucks each shared together, times five is five thousand cents a lot of cents, together one bill of change no passing the buck within range, shoot for the stars stamp it, and send that message home this poem, is for the pentacle famous five I stand before you today in this circle square with a voice, something to say because of them, and others like them their bones remain in ours rattle, XXchange watermark voice, of choice five old biddies on a fifty lives well spent, rejoice
Puti/White
Puti/White explores the past in places buried under layers of shifting reality. Here a poet searches for her lost roots – partly remembered, partly imagined – where language questions the everyday and probes the persistent difficulties of preserving the personal from the pull of the public world. These poems seek to capture the voices that lie within, those engagements of the particular with the universal that spark moments of grace.
Awards/Award Nominations
Winner: Global Filipino Literary Award for Poetry
Shortlisted for Trillium Poetry Award
Reviews
Patria Rivera has clearly been indelibly affected by both the largely-charged and the everyday. She brings both to bear in her poems. Through her taut, intelligent verse, the reader can imaginatively access other geographies and uncommon encounters, created from the matrices of general history and personal memory. ~Elana Wolff, surface & symbol
This is Rivera’s gift, this ability to reach into a remembered time with utmost ease and clarity – delineating pain, divining life. ~Remé Grefalda, Galatea Resurrects
Puti/White chronicles the exile’s condition and the conditions leading to exile, without guile, nostalgia or pity. Right from the bilingual title of Rivera’s very fine collection, which was justly a finalist for this year’s Trillium Prize in poetry, oppositions exist in unquestioned justaposition: home with exile, belonging with exclusion, torture with moments of breathtaking and breath-giving grace… An absorbing and promising first book, Puti/White suggests an alternative to homelessness, inviting us instead to be multi-homed, learning the past by heart without wearing it on our sleeves. ~Katia Grubisic, The Globe and Mail
Puti/White is a compelling book of poems by Filipino-Canadian writer Patria Rivera, which dance us through a world rich in lyric, colour and vivid imagery… Certain images, often dark, run throughout the book – the repetition of references, such as the heartrending “Naomi in a shoebox”, add to Rivera’s explored notions of disappearance and exile, poverty and silence. War, women and language are examined in their relation to the nature of the Earth. Among many things, this book is a marriage of the living, the dead and the ghosts among us hidden in language. ~Jocelyn Grossé, Fast Forward
This may be Ms. Rivera’s first full-length collection, but she’s obviously been around the block a few times and she was a delightful discovery for this reader. … Quite simply put, this is an excellent book, and a most welcome debut. Not since Rienzi Crusz’s debut, have I tasted such rich language and succulent turns of phrase. ~Richard Stevenson, The Danforth Review
In poems both tough and tender, Patria Rivera explores the notion of exile – from place, culture, and language – with passion, precision, and wisdom. This is a book to savour. ~Helen Humphreys
Samples
The scent of mangoes on a lazy afternoon
On the verge of a summer solstice
bunched green rice stalks
point arrows of precipitation
from streams that shoulder out the river;
tilt and shift of wet slate
river rock
hover of sulphur in an orange afternoon
resined breath of Grand-Aunt Ela
hatching mangoes golding under a bed
warmed by bodies of callow women
their rumps of sorrow
penance for barrenness of bedrock
precipitous mass
seeding the everyday corners of the day.
Silence levels the dark
birdnip and tuck of small hours
hide my forebears’ flagrant predilection
for warm musk of ripeness
quick-scatter of tears
while they wait solemn as bats for their quarry.
Geography class, 1960
We roamed streets we first drew in Grade 4
learning the topography of monsoons.
La Loma,
our barrio, grew like a lichen on the foothills
of Sierra Madre Mountains. The Second World War
scorched its brown knolls into a suburb
of Manila’s illustrious dead, made even more
infamous by a huge cockpit, and pigs skewered
on bamboo spits, roasted for everyone’s celebrations.
Cocks and crows, pitogo trees and banyan roots
scuffed shadows on aureoled tombs, bloated urns,
crosses, sandstone angels, shrivelled maggots,
mausoleums, crypts piled on top of one another.
The scent of frangipani trailed humid evenings.
After the war, American soldiers decamped,
left us their Quonset huts, their taste for PX goods.
We did not bury our dead here.
They would’ve felt strange in this city of niches
and clapboard houses. The betting in the cockpit
would’ve drowned all grief:
Sa pula, sa puti –
the red and white cockfights crowing our luckless lives,
my aunts’ wailing – erased the small consolation
of a sky always blue.
Invisible Foreground
Invisible Foreground traces a journey from childhood into an adult world that is filled with tenderness, terror, and the wish for secure familial surroundings. Always on the verge of disappearing into a fractured memory the speaker is both sure and unsure of, these poems embroider lived reality with dreams of the imagination. Suburban houses, provincial terrain, furniture, feelings, physical desire (among other things) all serve, in the mind of the poet, as emotional set designs for a half century of life as performance.
Awards/Award Nominations
Nominated: Stephan G. Stephansson Award for Poetry
Reviews
A glorious chameleon on page or stage, Bateman tries on as many styles and forms of poetry in his new Quartet collection as he does costumes. Invisible Foreground is as balanced as a practiced set of gams in high heels…. Poems move soft or strong like different types of lover’s touches for the mind: “Calgary airport” begins, “I like to go to the airport/check into Swiss Chalet…” and proceeds into a magic metamorphosis of the commonplace. In a poem like “Terrain”, however, Bateman reaches beneath the ribcage for startling observations on hard experiences…. Irony and synecdoche, or symbolism, are Bateman’s light and dark sinewy threads for sewing together narrative voice into a radiant living scarf, fabric as liable to choke you up as to feel you up. A poetry of extreme originality, it will linger on the skin of all your senses until it sinks in for good. ~Laurie Fuhr, Fast Forward
[G]o out and buy this book! Buy it for the language play, the wit, the humour, the stand-up timing; hell, buy it because it’s good for you: you’ll learn a lot about what Scottish poet W.S. Graham used to say the language is using us for. Your mother would approve: Bateman’s that damn good! ~Richard Stevenson, The Danforth Review
David Bateman’s poems crumble around you like the desperate, pitiful ruins of old buildings. And they touch you in the same way, taking you by surprise. They have the rambling illogic that life does, and they make me want to write. A bit profane, a bit philosophical, a bit of all sexes and sexualities – they conjure the image of the man (or woman) himself. I can hear David reading them in my head, or singing a song just a wee bit out of tune. ~Sky Gilbert
This series of poems traverses between the fraught and the beautiful, the violent and the tragic of suburban bodies, suburban desires. De-familiarizing these main-streamed spaces with tenderness and a sly humor Bateman’s seemingly simple language is layered and complex. Like a beautiful man stepping out of a gown…. Gorgeous. ~Hiromi Goto
Samples
Watching Grown Men Cry
1
over cappuccino with a warm shot of whiskey beside a thin young woman on a barstool in a lounge named “East of Never” under pressure in a late night board meeting when his son will be the eastern star by nine in a first grade play named “Heaven” after stand-up sex with his golfing buddy in a fully equipped RV while the wives are at the spa when the flirtatious lesbian economy of the straight women he works under excludes and excites him before undressing for dinner in full frontal perusal of twenty five years of living he will never get back beside the pane fused light of a sun razed moon on a surreal jigsaw on a commode in his den regardless of pomegranate salad sun dried children sent to camp she asks him to go down on her again with his shallow feet awakening in a sudden stream of light and some fragility in shadows
2
inside a posh new holding pen for new psychiatric patients interrogating $2000 red leather Barcelona knock-offs below a wreath of holiday wealth imagining belief in small paternalistic doses without regard for nothing less than fine wine praise for middle aged women sunglasses and scarves beyond question the faint vivacious tremor of her lower lips inside identity defined by birth certificates driver’s licences genital configurations and undotted sin above reproach for moody playoff seasons male menopausal breath beneath cribbage boards plastic pegs hedge clippings and the news of the world unless heaven allows foundational bliss and flood insurance
Between the Silences
Between the Silences invites us to sit in the back row of Family and Youth Court, where important decisions are made everyday – decisions that can affect our children, our families, our friends, our neighbours, our communities. The fortunate among us will never be inside a courthouse. But Diane Buchanan takes us there with her poetry. Writing with the heart of a woman who is both nurse and mother, she uses poetry not to lull us but to wake us up. In a series of word snapshots and evocative portraits she creates a collage of images both thought-provoking and heartrending. Between the Silences reveals that strange and poignant world on the other side of the courthouse door.
Awards/Award Nominations
Shortlisted for the Acorn-Plantos Award
Reviews
More powerful than a camera or artist’s pencil could ever be in capturing what happens in a court of law. ~The Branch Line 7
Buchanan goes further than most of us would dare to tread into the courthouse and its stories, which are occasionally hopeful, many times tragic and ultimately human. She observes as though she has been a juror on many cases, seeing both sides and aiming to find the truth somewhere in the middle. She breaks down generalizations, giving us many points of view… And through her individualized narratives, she challenges the stereotypes, not only of young offenders, but of criminals and people in custody battles as well. This makes Between the Silences not only a beautiful book of poems, but an important one, too. Jocelyn Grossé, Fast Forward
This book works the way good courtroom drawings work…. [I]t nevertheless, renders with quick, deft strokes, the heart of the matter, and the accumulative effect of all this portraiture and careful observation serves, as the title so aptly indicates, how important it is to find the human element. ~Richard Stevenson, The Danforth Review
Between the Silences reminds us that fully-realized poetry not only takes us places we’ve never quite been, but changes us with its urgent presence. At first, Buchanan seems a courtroom artist sketching. Soon, however, she immerses us along with herself in the raw narrative of the court’s arbitration in the ruins of our private lives. The accumulative sense is a profound loss of home. The poet discovers there is “no common denominator.” The loss is everywhere. Buchanan’s skillful rendering of these poems, the respectful restraint with which they are written, and the heart by which they are inspired, are rare. ~ Betsy Warland
The courthouse poems are a gift to all of us. ~ Patrick Lane
Samples
The Haunting
There are ghosts in court today. Ghosts of bullied victims past. The courtroom shivers with their swirling. The odor of their fear has haunted the defendant for some time now. Fourteen when his peers first began to threaten and harass. A year older when that fear led him to arm himself. Those ghosts hover nearby. as he takes the witness stand, a pretty boy with gelled bleached hair, dressed meticulously in black. He tells the judge about that day in the gymnasium, the day those same boys picked a fight while the whole class cheered, the day his fear was so severe he grabbed the lock and chain from his gym bag and swung it around until a teacher interfered, called the police. He was charged with possession of a weapon with intent to injure. Today he’s found guilty – because, of course, by law he is, although mitigating circumstances allow the penalty to be less severe. As he stands for sentencing he hears he’s free to go, to unarm himself, do community service hours, but it will be much harder to turn off that fear, lay to rest those victims of bullying past, leave their ghosts at the courtroom door.
Little Girl Lost
He brought her into the courtroom. She wants to take her home. Four year old Maggie plays around their feet where they stand at opposing counsel tables telling the judge their sides. Voices angry, bodies tense they list the reasons why they can’t agree on custody. The little girl crawls out from under the tables, takes Daddy’s hand then reaches across that hostile space to grab Mommy’s hand and hangs there lost in the uncertainty of the in-between.
No Holds Barred
by Kevin Irie and Robert Stallworthy and J. Fisher and Lisa Pasold
You can now listen to the poets of Quartet 2004 in your car, on your early morning jog, in your living room or in the bathtub if you’re so inclined. Kevin Irie reads from Angel Blood: The Tess Poems, J. Fisher from Death Day Erection, Bob Stallworthy from Optics, and Lisa Pasold from Weave. If you ever doubted that listening to poets read from their own work gives an added dimension to the poems, you can now hear it for yourself. No Holds Barred ~ the unleashed, unruly, unpredictable foursome of Quartet 2004 in full dramatic voice!
Weave
by Lisa Pasold
In a country whose name keeps changing, a woman longs to return to an imaginary past. Part fiction, part biography, part fairy-tale, Weave is a photograph that fell onto the rails when the story-teller changed trains. Or perhaps it slipped into the waves of the lake when her two-seater plane took off. Or she tore it into pieces and buried it in the woods, to keep it safe. Now she’s searching for her lost identity, from the banks of the Danube, to the port of Istanbul, to the frozen edge of Lake Ontario. She’s looking for some fragment of home to give meaning to her pile of passports, left like ghosts in the bottom of a drawer.
Awards/Award Nominations
Short-listed for Alberta Book Awards Trade Fiction Book Award
Reviews
Weave reads as a memoir of the twentieth century in a world bounded by Prague and Peru and the Russian Front and the shores of Lake Ontario. The narrator is a traveler and an exile, and she seems to be perpetually in transit. Her brother Wilhelm serves as mythical interlocutor, and we are led by their sibling love into and out of the darkness of Europe. Weave is quite simply a masterpiece: there is more in these eighty odd pages than in most novels. ~Stephen Osborne, Geist
One thinks immediately of Mavis Gallant’s Paris Notebooks, for example, as Pasold distills journalling or lifewriting to good effect. ~Anne Burke, The Prairie Journal of Canadian Literature
Pasold’s ability to capture the personal, the political and societal expectations of an era is impressive; the narrator telling stories “on an aeroplane or in a train compartment, as if we are hurtling / through a tunnel and / neither of us knows what is on the other side.” ~Rajinder S. Pal, This Magazine
Titles such as “there is no explanation suitable for a girl of 13 burdened by intellect,” “the reason I didn’t get a balcony” and “it was in Paris I bought Josephine Baker’s old shoes” adorn Weave’s delicious, at times cryptic narrative of a woman tracing her past. … This book addresses the complexities of war, nationality and national identity in the simple but clever accounts from a woman’s memory. ~Jocelyn Grossé, Fast Forward
The book fascinates on both narrative and lyric levels. Pasold never confuses feeling with sentiment, and she has a gift for memorable images which work together to form a poetic vocabulary … This book’s a keeper, one you’ll reread and read aloud. ~Harry Vandervlist, Alberta Views
A fictional memoir, it almost achieves the reach and breadth of the roman a clef or rites of passage novel and alternates between the intimate first-person monologue and more distant analytical lens of second person, creating the patchwork quilt and embroidery of the title. ~Richard Stevenson, Lethbridge Insider
Lisa Pasold’s language is so piercing and compassionate it made me catch my breath, and her knowledge of myth, symbol and history are as impressive as her understanding of the human heart. Individually, these are poems of great beauty and ferocity; read as a fictional memoir they are a myth-embroidered memory quilt; a narrative not only of a fascinating woman, full of exile, longing, and wit, but of a defining period in history. I cannot recommend this book highly enough. ~Lauren B. Davis, author of The Stubborn Season
Weave is a book of poems that reads like a superb novel, flows like a thrilling movie, and is marked by moments of consummate wit and lyricism. Telling the story of an unforgettable 20th century life, Lisa Pasold has created compelling 21st-century poetry. Her Prague-born protagonist’s journey – through love, war, exile and the harrowing way station of memory – is, indeed, a beautifully-layered, intricately-textured and expertly-cut cloth. With this collection, Pasold surely establishes herself as one of the best younger Canadian poets now writing. ~Todd Swift, author of Cafe Alibi
Samples
(Canadian winter)
I like the taste of water in this country. you can taste
how young it is, how it has never been drunk
before. (haven’t you ever felt like that, as if you are about to be
drunk for the first time?)
how to recapture such virginity
the snow blows against the west side of the house, wind coming off the lake, I climbed out the winter, I mean, the window,
waist-deep in the snowbank
I was in diamond-patterned pyjamas
(wearing jewelry) while in transit
a diamond bracelet sewn into the hem of a skirt gives the fabric a heft that translates well into local currency I have a good ear for languages (use silk thread, it is thinner. more stitches to hold your inheritance in place) we have always been merchants and experts in exchange who doesn’t have a past someone will pay money for.
Optics
Focusing on intensely personal experiences, Optics shows vision as a trick of light. We see through a glass barrier we’ve placed between ourselves and our world, often filtered by the warps and swirls caught in that glass. We stand behind a window that is growing dark in early winter, not even noticing the creeping darkness across the glass blocking our vision. The poems explore the world reflected back by a simple piece of glass.
Awards/Award Nominations
Short-listed for the City of Calgary W.O. Mitchell Book Prize
Reviews
Optics is a moving, personal account of life as we reflect upon what it means to experience change and confront loss. Stallworthy’s commentary on caregiving for a parent afflicted with Alzheimer’s, and excellent use of metaphor, offers many poignant moments. He expertly captures the sense of drift we feel when confronted with situations beyond our control. Bob Stallworthy’s gift is to transfer his acute observations to the page using metaphors that make a quick and indelible imprint upon the reader’s eye. ~Comments from the Jury for the City of Calgary W.O. Mitchell Book Prize
The effect of Optics is cumulative, even symphonic, with the strongest voice assigned to sight. Reflecting in kaleidoscopic angles Stallworthy’s unassuming, thoughtful poetic vision succeeds particularly in recording, examining and displaying filial affection and disaffection. We are gradually drawn into the gaze of the poems and into the shifting meanings and images that refocus through the book into a satisfying whole. ~Comments from the Jury for the City of Calgary W.O. Mitchell Book Prize
This is Stallworthy’s work at its best, an example of mixing the ordinary with an attempt at something reminiscent of magic realism. ~Jocelyn Grosse, Fast Forward
Optics is an excellent collection, choc-a-bloc full of epiphanies and poignant moments of acute observation, and Mr. Stallworthy has developed a lean, muscular line, tighter narrative focus, and killer sense of closure in these poems. ~Richard Stevenson, Lethbridge Insider
The epigrammatic quality of this poetry loses nothing in its translation from imagination to images fashioned on the page. ~Anne Burke, The Prairie Journal of Canadian Literature
These poems explore the seemingly inexhaustible metaphoric potential of those every-day frames that capture perceptions: storm windows, blinds, rear-view mirrors. Stallworthy’s careful glance often finds that elusive membrane between people where the form of a relationship condenses and becomes visible. ~Harry Vandervlist, Alberta Views
The poems of Optics are about how a man can envy the sun as it escapes the frame of the window it darkens as it goes. They are about keeping your eye on the window until it shows how you look without mercy. This is a book by a saddened lover of the world. It is about Bob Stallworthy as son, stepson, care-giver, forgotten son, yes. And it is the work of Bob Stallworthy the artist polishing his poems a pane at a time until the best shine black as glass. ~Richard Harrison
Samples
Optics
there must be windows that laugh allow yellow sun light to pool on the living room rug the spot where the dog curls eyes squeezed muscles remembering the dream that got away somewhere there must be eyes that allow light to crinkle spill remembered laughter from their corners notice how a window turns black? not all at once the darkness spreads from the middle into the corners until the last time you look it has spread completely out to the edges and when the glass is finally black it is a mirror throwing your face back into the room
Death Day Erection
by J. Fisher
Death day erection
last bone thrown
down life’s roadway of lost mileage.
From “Passing on Horse” by J. Fisher
Awards/Award Nominations
Short-listed for Alberta Book Awards: Book Illustration of the Year
Reviews
J. Fisher is the Quintessential counter-culture archetype, a James Dean incarnate… Fisher’s strongest work blends base abstractions with complex allusions. Nevertheless he achieves some dexterous sleights of hand (it’s all in the wrist) and a sense of alienation only the young can cherish. ~Anne Burke, Prairie Journal
(Fisher) draws equally from the wells of Beat, punk, and street vernacular/performance oriented poets like the Renegades, Hip Hoppers, and Nuyorican Café poets. Charles Bukowski, Jim Carroll, and Lou Reed lurk in the shadows here too… His strengths — sense of melody and rhythm, ability to extemporize through rhyme, half rhyme, or image association — are everywhere in abundance. ~Richard Stevenson, Lethbridge Insider
Fisher’s undeniable energy will take him further down the road of excess toward the palace of wisdom. ~Harry Vandervlist, Alberta Views
An atheist with an uncommon adhesion to the profane attributes of current mortal satisfactions, J. Fisher will have you enticed, his imagery will haunt you and his lacerate heart will **** you gently to the next piece of art. Enjoy, be welcome, beware. ~Christopher Rice
Samples
Vaseline Era
“…time to get clean, boy time to get clean. Like a whistle stop, or pumpernickel smell, shaving only one side of your face, not out of madness but out of glee.” These are easy words coming from this man one so used to filthy circumstances. “I’ve waited a long while in this burrow …began to have doubts, but now that you’re here we’ll get moving.” He had grown lean-looking the sight was giving me the shivers. His long, unwashed hair was all about him. He had gone gorgeous in some sorrowful dream. An old-fashioned masculine to re-coup for all those years spent under the gun. “…time to get clean” indeed.
Budica
Towers of information fall from the sky. Buildings get diseased, a cancer in the steel that comes from holding in a sickness of people. Everyone alive today is submerged to the lips, just one moment away from sucking in the filth left over when all truth is removed -- sensational saturation and very little else. The crush of modernity has left us all in lurch while shattering the smallest and the weakest among us under the weight of observation, constant and unwelcomed: the Great Roaming Eye. Our lives become spectator sport. There is a ringing rousing the unconscious Dog, it’s got the beast shivering from the sins we romanticize.
Angel Blood: The Tess Poems
by Kevin Irie
Angel Blood: The Tess Poems is Kevin Irie’s radical re-interpretation of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Here, Tess herself recounts her tale of sex, class, money, and violence. This is the voice not of a Victorian maiden but a demonic Tess returned from the dead, unleashed from the underworld. Finally free to speak as she pleases, and with nothing to lose, she does not care who will be taken aback, be it husband, family, or “The President of the Immortals” – or even the innocent reader.
Awards/Award Nominations
Long-listed for the 2005 ReLit Awards
Reviews
Adopting the posthumous voice of a wronged girl from 19th-century fiction makes for a bold imaginative leap on Irie’s part. Yet he enters into Tess’s situation so thoughtfully, and his diction is so exact, that he ends up making a success of it. ~Harry Vandervlist, Alberta Views
Angel Blood is a clever palimpsest that re-positions the dramatic monologue and Tess’s intimate thoughts squarely in our time and place. …In the end, her character emerges as complex, clever, manipulative, decidedly in-control; we sympathize with her plight but cheer on her feminine wiles. Kevin Irie’s narrative gifts and use of dramatic, verbal, and situational irony are an endless source of delight. Readers will want to return to the salacious gossip and pick up on the metafictional gloss on point of view and narrative strategy – its duplicitous, devious meanderings – at the same time. ~Richard Stevenson, Lethbridge Insider
The narrative is interesting on a number of levels: because it is written in Tess’s voice, because it is reflective (we hear from Tess as a spirit), because it is a commentary on the way women were treated at the time of Hardy’s novel and because this is a male poet writing from a woman’s perspective. Irie succeeds in creating a strong narrative and his lines seduce readers into Tess’s world. ~Jocelyn Grosse, Fast Forward
This isn’t a Victorian angel of the hearth, but a flesh and blood heroine. It has been suggested that “Tess” is a fictional figure drawn from the heroines of works by Fielding, Disraeli, Thackery, Gaskell and Eliot. Well, counterposed with Sylvia Plath, Medbh McGuckian, Elizabeth Bishop, Eira Stenberg, Anne Carson, Moniza Alvi, John Sutherland, Susan Musgrave and Anne Sexton, by Irie, virtually anything is possible. Another Tess is heartbreakingly probable. ~Anne Burke, Prairie Journal
Tapping into the emotions of willful Tess Durbeyfield of Thomas Hardy’s novel Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Kevin Irie gestures to the reader to overhear her intimate thoughts, and there are heart-quickening moments aplenty: “I felt my childhood leave without me,” “He would be what I earn for my living,” “Where do you find the mercy to grieve for yourself?” “A woman gone missing from her own life.” I could continue in this vein, but it is better for the reader to discover such intimacies in this book of poems about a literary character who is either a woman who is pure or a “pure woman.” ~John Robert Colombo
Samples
On the Burial of an Infant
When your child dies the way you once wished it would before its birth, where do you bury your pain, the guilt, the shame one part of you casts at the other? Where do you find the mercy to grieve for yourself, and not grieve more for the child instead? Do you lay that self in the grave with your baby, lay it in earth, buried together, victim and killer now side by side, dead as you wanted that infant dead, its life the evidence held against you? Do you tell yourself that you didn't really mean it, that you were desperate, afraid, or sick- a set of lies you carry like keys to let yourself in and out of your guilt? In what dead part of you does she live, that unborn mother, awaiting her impending sentence of birth? Is it her hand that steadies your own as you lower the flowers upon the grave, drops a tear from your open eye like a paltry donation to public decorum? How can you stand to live with it now, this love that survives the life that could not, your own child, a baby. Death, in the end, the better parent: the one that will never abandon its own.
Variations on the Word Spirit
Spirit. A man talks of spirit like some aphrodisiac to be scooped from the flesh, something that ripens best in the young, hands eager to hunt it down in the deep folds of a virgin's dress. Spirit. Something a man breaks in a filly. Hot beast bucking under his thighs, legs pumping as he straddles the bed. His mind on a canter when he thinks of that one. Spirit. The kind a man drinks at night, falls down dead, until, he says, he sees a Spirit, ghost in the night. A dead child, son, a spirit whose death still moves inside me, memories of how I prayed to save him, in the name of the son and the holy spirit. Spirit. A verb, to snatch, in secret. Carried away like a maid by her master. Kidnapped. Caught. No one to help. Who knows its meaning? Say it out loud. Spirit. A word with as many sides as a woman. A woman gone missing from her own life.
Wayward
by Ali Riley
A hotel maid is visited by the Holy Spirit, an ex child star finds temporary solace in a baby-dreaded rent boy, and an assortment of drifters, wastrels and lost girls seek transcendance and good times in the alternate universe that is Wayward. Part autobiographical exorcism, part analysis of the myth of the fallen woman, Wayward brings a haunting and unexpected perspective to being “on the road.”
Awards/Award Nominations
Shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Award
Reviews
Wayward, poems by Ali Riley and illustrations by Meghan Hildebrand, is a trip along the drift, on the road and on the streets, you won’t soon forget. Told from the disad/vantage point of the lost girls: the runaways, the prostitutes, the missing, and the murdered women, Riley takes the readers outside zones of comfort and complacency. ~Dee Horne, Canadian Literature
Ali Riley is a welcome new voice in Canadian poetry. Wayward is very raw, very lively, very emotionally provocative. It deals with young womanhood with a real raw integrity. ~Jennifer Lovegrove, TVO’s “Imprint”
A remarkable excursion into the perilous realities of “lost girls” trekking through a landscape of rudderless fellow-travellers and banal predators. The sheer grace, confidence, and agility of Wayward is a feat in itself, emotionally affecting precisely because of its unsparing, unsentimental and unflinching approach… Wayward is bound to become a well-worn and dog-eared denizen of a true poetry lover’s bookshelf. ~Ian Samuels, The Calgary Herald
Riley doesn’t leave us tossing in lyric storms, but likes a quietly cadenced ending, as if she wants to walk us through hell only to prove that with the right guide, you can get through it. ~Sonnet l’Abbe, The Globe and Mail
Riley’s poems dissect the pain of female adolescence and show the ways this pain is acted out. ~Barbara Curry Mulcahy, Alberta Views
Riley’s vibrant writing illustrates the often alarming situations faced by girls satisfying an itch to escape. The effect is disturbing and intense. ~Diane Dechief, FFWD
The writing itself is lively, punchy — like the lyrics of the Patti Smith or Lou Reed songs the poet admires and alludes to… Indeed, Riley is capable of the bon mot, terse expression, pastiche, droll, sloe-eyed delivery. ~Richard Stevenson, The Lethbridge Insider
Once in a while a writer returns from the serrated edge of human experience with accounts so accomplished in language and craft that she or he wins an audience eager to listen to tales of the dark places of the human soul, of the bleak and fearful locales at the margins of our civilization. Ali Riley is one such writer and the poems of Wayward will quickly convince you. A word of warning. Make sure your personal safety devices are locked and loaded. Ali Riley is about to be your guide on a voyage to destinations you will wish never existed. I can promise you, however, that her consummate mastery of words will ensure you thoroughly enjoy the trip. ~Tom Wayman
Ali Riley’s writing manages to be spare yet baroque, cutting yet caressing, a wedding and a funeral; it is life as it is meant to be lived: full on into the light with an ever present awareness of the nearby darkness. Read her and be the richer for it. ~Daniel MacIvor
Samples
Ghost Daughter
You can’t talk to your daughter she rolls her eyes she looks daggers screams “Hypocrite!” screams “Stolen Land!” Her scars are a drug nothing stops the blood in her head like letting it flow across to show down to go ladders up her arms her legs ladders to her head ladders to her heart her wrists her ankles down her right thigh a graceful not-quite-healed snake she’s traded her birthright for a beat she can dance to dark corner crimson tide X carved through a new pair of tights she fondles a matchbook if she were a boy she might try arson or bar fights but she is a girl so she takes it out on the nearest available bit of flesh. A delicate operation— opening yourself to pins and needles, the harsh white light of a small porcelain room “She’s indestructible” they say “She couldn’t destroy herself even if she tried” and try she does fitting and gnashing sexing the chaos. You thought you saw her creeping into the master bedroom knife between her teeth— leading an army of vengeful children. The nation’s bathrooms are full adolescents acting out a dimly remembered ascetic past— they are possessed overcome their bodies host old souls an angry tribe centuries dead they are fasting seeing visions bloodletting a sleeping shaman lies in your bathtub as you floss your teeth he opens one eye whispers “we shall live again” You can’t talk to your daughter she runs the gauntlet from back door to bedroom she shoots through the family room like an arrow wearing that jacket you despise a ghost shirt deflecting your gaze, your questions Her door slams upstairs her music begins artillery bass bass bass now her footsteps are dancing dancing like a warrior.
“If You Think They Don’t Go Crazy In Tiny Rooms”
He left a star-shaped stain in the middle of the Motel 6 floor. So much for that party trick, she thinks. She came in here eight days ago to vacuum, now she languishes like Catherine Deneuve in Repulsion. He’s taken to hiding piles of powder for her to find, powder she’s afraid to try. Would it rev her up or slow her down? Where is he anyway? Has it really been over a week? Her beige maid’s dress, not quite a colour, more like all flavours of boredom melted into one sad shade. Not a pinch of interest to this outfit, but for the tiny speck of chipped nail polish (Scarlet pimpernel) nestled in the waffle-weave. These are deluxe accommodations, but she’s still not sure why she’s here. She received a stack of tens on the bedside table two days ago but since then nothing but the star. This stain. “Stella” she says out loud, looking at it. The air conditioner sighs along with her, feel, see, whisper, listen, it says. soar however you can, extols the bar fridge its pitch rising, it adopts a wheedling tone— soar you must! with brandy, with words, with graceful appetite— she finally unplugs it. she finds a plastic sign hanging from the doorknob. “Maid — please make this room sing with your spirit” and on the other side, simply “Please be profound”. This melanine and Fortrel won’t yet help her transcend, but they ache to be used to climb to heaven. All things, even the pock-marked mystery-stained upholstery of a motel chair (especially that!) beg to be used for something other than dull, vile practices. Direct your attention to this burn on the couch. See where the fabric melts into beads? This is where the Voice will speak two days from now. In her wilder days she thoughtlessly rolled joints in the parchment of Gideon’s Bible. Leaves of Grass! In the words of G-d! Suddenly this horrifies her. What Emissary will speak to her in this place anonymous as an airport neither here nor there?
go-go dancing for Elvis
go-go dancing for Elvis by Leslie Greentree is the story of two sisters: the beautiful sister, who travels the States as a dancer for an Elvis impersonator, and her more conventional sister, who stays home and renovates her house. It’s a story of love, jealousy, betrayal, and the people who used to have our phone numbers. Most of all it’s a story about Hawkeye Pierce and power tools.
Awards/Award Nominations
Shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize
Reviews
Leslie Greentree is a conversational poet whose artful talk is not afraid to engage any subject head-on. Her unpretentious, sometimes comic, lower-case poems have an irresistible charm. They pull us into the funk and drama of her everyday experience and, further, into the center of her interior life. ~The Griffin Prize Jury, 2004
Greentree’s careful attention to language, the confidence of her execution, and above all her wry and gentle humour keep go-go dancing fresh and interesting throughout. ~Ian Samuels, The Calgary Herald
Leslie Greentree’s highly readable go-go dancing for Elvis achieves immediate intimacy with a dishy, kitchen-chair voice… The book pleases honestly, in the way of a cotton dress that clings in all the right places. ~Sonnet l’Abbe, The Globe and Mail
go-go dancing for Elvis is as fun as the title suggests the book will be… The book is an easy, quick read, and … repays several readings and has an accumulative punch, rather in the way a good collection of linked stories or rites-of-passage or Roman à Clef novel does. ~Richard Stevenson, The Lethbridge Insider
Like Greentree’s first book, guys named Bill, go-go dancing for Elvis, is a rollicking read and a book to savour. ~Barbara Curry Mulcahy, Alberta Views
Leslie Greentree … takes us through a linear and hilarious story… She employs a clever, tongue-in-cheek tone as she tells of her narrator’s everyday existence. ~Diane Dechief, FFWD
With incredible insight, Leslie Greentree explores the dance of human relationships, the nuances of communication, and the intricacies of daily life. go-go dancing for Elvis performs with skill, humour, and tenderness; but be warned: Greentree is a scorpion-poet and her words always deliver a sting. ~Joan Crate
What a read! Greentree’s poems crackle with humour, self-deprecation, celebration and woe. The book is a domestic extravaganza of being single and female: the fear of inadequacy, the sense that others are having a much better time, the loneliness of love gone wrong, the carnival of house renovations and lust. This book is like a best friend who invites you over for a glass of wine and a gab session. Say yes, I’ll be right over! Cancel everything, grab the car keys, and crack open this book. ~Nancy Holmes
Samples
black go-go boots
it's stylized sixties the black boots are to her knees but the tank top with the silver spaghetti straps and her tiny skirt only nod to the originals the colours are carefully psychedelic the first photograph shows her and Elvis laughing her go-go boot draped lightly over his satin thigh hair pulled high on her head ponytail cascading over her shoulders slapping her in the face as she gyrates the second is of her in the classic pose arms pumping clenched fists hair flying boots planted firmly two feet apart her head is down eyes closed I can feel the music here something like Jailhouse Rock or his bastardized version of Hound Dog she’s having the time of her life when she wore her boots to supper she felt wild and mod getting such a kick out of this outfit like the kid who used to put on the old clothes from Mom’s dress-up box Elvis told her to go back to the room and change he’s had enough of looking at that crap every night does he really have to take his work with him to supper? part of me is glad to see that even a go-go dancer for Elvis can be made to feel like an idiot be spoken to in that way but I still want to drive to their hotel in Reno and kick his ass
A Gloss on Our Painted Gods
by Eric Barstad
A Gloss on Our Painted Gods is concerned with the idea of translation: of poetry as translation, as a way of reinventing, retelling, transforming, and understanding the world around us, our mythologies, our notions of the self and the other. A tightly crafted first book, it explores and responds to the cultural artifacts of Western history: Greek and Roman texts, Renaissance paintings, and early 20th-century European poetry.
Reviews
From Orpheus to Arachne’s Suitor, these poems evoke universal themes of life and death; love and hate, wins and losses…. These lines are not soon forgotten, but linger. ~Dee Horne, Canadian Literature
Barstad obviously loves language, collecting and setting rare words like jewels into his poems… Like his three contemporaries, Barstad’s got fire. ~Sonnet L’Abbe, The Globe and Mail
The poems of A Gloss on Our Painted Gods are extremely well-written, intelligent, and intellectual… This is a young, urbane, sophisticated poet’s first book: there is nothing naive about it. ~Richard Stevenson, The Lethbridge Insider
Barstad is eloquent in the manner of Ondaatje, conveying emotions that relate to love present and past. ~Diane Dechief, FFWD
Barstad’s poetry revels in language, intelligence and wild imagery… Cruelty, treachery and pain are often explored in these rich and cadenced poems. ~Barbara Curry Mulcahy, Alberta Views
Barstad’s poetry often strives with ambitious historical subjects: the resonance of moments in classical history with our own time, for instance, or the long shadows cast by great poets of the past. ~Ian Samuels, The Calgary Herald
From heroes of Greek myth to birds in an aviary, from Caligula to Hearne at the Coppermine. The world Barstad gives us is deft yet exacting: each poem is caught, held, run through with a claw. This is a fine, lean collection of work. ~Anne Simpson
To read Barstad’s poetry is to delight in the strange aviary of the imagination. His writing is a marvellous blend of the absolutely ordinary and everyday with the fanciful, the remarkable, the bizarre and the magnificent. ~Ross Leckie
Samples
About the Poem I Wanted to Write
I wanted to write a poem with epithets
and ancient Greek and Roman names.
I wanted to say pious, goddess-born Aeneas, or
Hector, tamer of horses.
I wanted to allude
to obscure passages from long poems that nobody
reads anymore, unless to explain parts of other,
shorter, slightly less obscure poems.
Maybe I could have said something about dolphins –
I like dolphins – playing among the trees
of a flooded land. Or I could have written about
two senior citizens – too old for sex – throwing
their mother’s bones behind them
in hopes of repopulating the world.
I would have mentioned Triton
– Great God! I’d rather be a pagan –, wet beard
and all that, blowing his conch, summoning
who knows who from wherever.
I would have put
Jupiter in my poem. Not the Jupiter – the swan,
the shower of gold, the mortal man – whose offspring
are legion and dalliances renowned, but the Jupiter
whose flowing locks shake the very foundations
of heaven and earth; the Jupiter who can give birth
from his head and thigh.
And I definitely would’ve talked about that blind prophet
who was a man then a woman then a man just because
he stepped on a snake, or killed a snake, or did something
to a snake.
But what I really wanted to do
was write a poem with Greek and Roman names,
and epithets, like pious, goddess-born Aeneas, and Hector,
tamer of horses.
The Misanthropy of Horizon
(In search of Coppermine River, Canada, 1770) Hunger’s hurt has taken us far beyond tolerance for Hearne’s bravado. The Indians have started to eat at the skin of their garments, buck long-since dead and ragged with wear. It’s been six days since I’ve been able to shit, chewing on leather. There is no shelter here in the flats, and we’ve torn up the tent for shoes; the only fire comes from moss we gather in palmfuls, sifting through the scalloped snow, the sun turning its back on us, the drunken wind blowing in circles. This is the misanthropy of horizon: to never see the line between grey and white broken by animal or bird or the welcome philosophy of trees. And yet, it is some greater malignance that desires us now, and we hear it in the lake’s low growl beneath the ice.
Dinner at Madonna’s
by Kevin Irie
Kevin Irie’s Dinner at Madonna’s explores the fusion of personal and historic memory and nationality within the context of growing up in multicultural Canada. A third generation Japanese-Canadian, he writes:
Memory is the country I hold
as a citizen displaced
by my time in the world.
Reviews
Kevin Irie’s book is his third, and, for my money, the best, most mature collection here… These poems scale the upper reaches of Parnassus and bring back the news. ~Richard Stevenson, The Lethbridge Insider
Irie’s work is beautifully restrained as it moves from Toronto to Italy to British Columbia, and out of that restraint comes some truly arresting images. In Sunday at the Vatican, for example we encounter the Pope at a window as “a lone tooth in an ancient mouth,” with a red tapestry below him “like a panting tongue”. The strength of Dinner is the frequency with which Irie lets such images speak for themselves, avoiding the temptation to overwrite them or bury them in commentary. ~Ian Samuels, The Calgary Herald
The collection takes us sequentially from the streets of Toronto’s Little Italy to the historically rich arteries of Venice, then back to Canada with a new, widened perspective… The work moves from distanced observation of others’ migrations to greater and greater intimacy.” ~Sonnet L’Abbe, The Globe and Mail
Dinner at Madonna’s is Kevin Irie’s third book, a mature and reflective work, full of resonance and depth… Sparse, carefully wrought and lit with piercing imagery, this work is moving and beautiful. ~Barbara Curry Mulcahy, Alberta Views
Here is a poet with a particular past walking through the streets of Venice and Toronto, through art galleries and back alleys, through familiar and foreign mythologies, startling us, arresting us with each unexpected turn of his heart and mind. ~Joy Kogawa
Samples
In Passing
They’re all dying, my uncle
tells me at the latest funeral,
the service in English, Japanese
food served at the home
where the neighbours ask
if the fish in the sushi is really raw,
and how do you eat it,
and does it taste—fishy?
The egg salad sandwiches chosen instead.
The Issei,
the oldest,
the first generation of immigrants,
most widows, nearing a century.
We rise,
give them a place to sit,
bring them sushi, rice bags,
a cup of green tea
as they peel off white gloves,
place black handbags by the side of the chair,
adjust their rimmed hats one more time
while the talk twists in and out of their hearing.
English is the stranger
who took their children away
from them years and years ago.
There are bean cakes,
coffee cake, side by side;
always the taste of one odd word or another
sticking to the tongue.
Eventually,
you learn to chew and swallow
or else
stay hungry.
Geraniums, Concord Avenue, Toronto
Memory is possession, and what is my own but these geraniums blooming in a Toronto window, kin to those I recall in Venice, their floral reds and pinks in challenge against that city’s domestic grey. Now, each leaf is a ticket back, my passage booked by a single glance. Each red petal a tongue to proffer return; the soft wax seal of an invitation. Home, but not settled, my life is a document named for planting in government files. Memory is the country I hold as a citizen displaced by my time in the world.
Tom Three Persons
Poet and scholar Yvonne Trainer enriches her complex and haunting portrait of Tom Three Persons, a Native Canadian and the first Calgary Stampede superhero, with a varied collage of images and writings and the personal viewpoint of a prairie ranch heritage.
Reviews
Yvonne Trainer. Damn fine writin’. Yep, that about sums ‘er up. ~Janice Mathie-Heck, filling Station
In poems, photographs, letters and newspaper clippings, Trainer re-imagines a rodeo rider from the Blood Reserve who became champion at the first Calgary Stampede in 1912. Laconic and reflective, Trainer’s writing seems to rein in a lyricism that bursts through in poems like “The Mind Is The Place.” ~Harry Vandervlist, FFWD
The language is simple; the narrative uncluttered; the lines spare and clean in the way Bert Almon’s or Glen Sorestad’s lines are clean: this is prairie realism as it should be, born of the soil. The poetic is as true to its subject as the short grass prairie is to the soil. There is no straining after effects or self-conscious posturing or rhetoric. If you think it’s easy to do this, try it! I for one am happy Yvonne Trainer is back with a virtuoso performance. ~Richard Stevenson, The Danforth Review
Yvonne Trainer listens with a poet’s love to the sounds around her. She hears voices, finds poems, in Tom Three Persons’ story. She retells Persons’ world, tells her own world, with such tact and such care we are brought into a new hearing. We listen in on the invented real music of her poetry. ~Dennis Cooley
Yvonne Trainer’s deceptively simple documentary poem about Tom Three Persons engages both the history of a time and place and of a man we should know. In her collage of found material, invention, and photographs, Trainer brings this extraordinary man into language where he can tell his story as it needs to be told. As Tom tells us, “names float in air”, and the poet, listening, catches them and their embodiments for her readers. ~Douglas Barbour
Emotional and physical impressions emerge with bone-crunching reality through this unique collection of poems, letters and reminiscences. A lyrical-narrative portraying highs and lows in the life of Tom Three Persons, an unforgettable First Nations cowboy. Yahoo! ~Shirlee Smith Matheson
Samples
Tom Three Persons
My name is Tom Three Persons I’m no relation to the American Tom Three Persons named because he killed three men I never killed anyone nor robbed a bank nor anything like that I was named because of three women mother saw walking past the door the moment of my birth Father claimed there were no women The door was closed I am not even sure there was a door I may have been born in a teepee I was named because we’re all named Because Bloods believe names float in air I the receiver of a name given I who knew none of this who crowed myself to sleep strapped in my cradle board under the watchful look of crows I who called their name before I knew my own.
the beginning
Born at the beginning of the beginning
Louis Riel hanged
Poundmaker and Big Bear jailed
Born at the beginning
of railroads and fences
and irrigation ditches
built like birth canals
Released
from walls
and flesh
No not released
but kicked a way through
wearing rattlesnake boots
and red angora chaps
Slit the umbilical cord
between sharp guns
faster than a rustler cutting fence
No better yet
rode out of a chute
on a shiny black
bucking horse
a winner.
Learning the Language
What kind of life was that? Jimmy at St. Paul’s Mission School bent like a question mark in a desk writing “I must not speak Blackfoot” one hundred times every time his tongue slipped At that school he learned a powerful new language silence.
Science Fiction Saint
Science Fiction Saint, by playwright and poet Nancy Jo Cullen, investigates the space between a more traditional lyric line and the experimental use of form and language. A provocative work that shimmers with risk and offbeat humour.
Awards/Award Nominations
Shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Award
Shortlisted for the Stephan G. Stephansson Award
Shortlisted for Alberta Book Awards Trade Fiction Book Award
Reviews
The poet has a real gift for juxtaposition, setting different language registers against one another, punning, and generally torquing up the language of the quotidian in interesting and unexpected ways… The leaps are adept, exciting, and often amusing, even, occasionally, breath-taking. ~Richard Stevenson, The Danforth Review
Cullen gives us front row seats at what Seigfried Sassoon called “the great theatre of the self”. Her work is a series of turns and pirouettes, leaping from childhood trauma, to sexual exploration, to the divine, to the possibilities of loving with one’s imagination, and back again, all without missing a beat. ~Alexander Rettie, Alberta Views
There’s a questing and multidimensional mind at work as the poems explore a real mix of subjects, from surviving girlhood to working in the small-town tourism industry to seduction. ~Harry Vandervlist, FFWD
Though an account of sainthood in other than the usual settings, Science Fiction Saint is still a story of triumph over the hells created for us in the violence and expectations of others. In both form and content, Cullen’s poetry is a sassy, assertive attack, irreverent in the way that all who question tradition remind us what it is to be human and strike out at what holds us back. ~Alberta Book Awards Jury
Just under each of these poems, invisibly audible, runs a camouflage of song. We can hear the words of heaven and hell, of the rites of passage, of sexuality, but what we really listen to is the song. Nancy Cullen uses her attentive and tuned ear to not only explore the obvious content of one’s own living but to literally tune into the hum behind the thought. These poems are what the imagination sounds like, the harmony of noise, those “chunks of whatever wasn’t vacuumed” after the confession. ~Fred Wah
Science Fiction Saint is a tightly woven collection of poetry filled with dynamic imagery. In its immediacy, the oral tradition meets the page in a playful celebration of life in the twenty first century. The reader is propelled between the lyrical and post-modern line as Nancy Jo Cullen speaks of a woman’s journey that questions, “What is holy?” all the time debunking myths that limit the possibilities of spirit. This first collection rockets. ~Sheri-D Wilson
Samples
personally
i want to remember my body is a temple floss my teeth
between you and me, i think of my teeth as representative of my adolescence: my terrible effort toward perfection, my first failure(s).
i do not dream of my husband. i dream of my past lovers & sometimes their sisters. i dream of them in pajamas that don’t fit.
i must be confused about my sexuality, these dreams of men and women and their sisters. certainly i have enjoyed penetration and the fat tongues of men. i think it is funny to say i am a gay divorcee, although it still comes up in my dreams that i am concerned about hell.
in the dream where i gave up women another man was my baby’s father and i instantly longed for all things lesbian, in particular the gossip.
but back to my teeth. i had them straightened, for which i gladly paid top dollar, and when finally i bit into an apple it was as sexy as fingers.
maybe a little bit like eve’s first bite. imagine her desire, overwhelming enough to shun safety for information. a thin line of juice trembling on her chin. lilith’s little sister finally coming into her own
(later when looking a photos of eve in her youth her loved ones will flinch, shocked by the damage of such a short space in time. how then she was as beautiful as a fashion model. eve unrepentant as ever (the irony not lost on her) tells her children, “hell’s what you make of it.”)
when i wanted to be older i wanted to be like that. like leanne on the mechanical bull; serious, drunk, almost as good as urban cowboy & not unaware of the consequences.
strange cities
forget strange cities the shape of your mother's sunglasses when she turned to look the camping trip on the banks of the peace when you weren't yet & your sisters in their thick cotton swimsuits now it is Monday pantyhose grip the corners of your thighs cross & uncross the business of the day what was it your father held in his hand in that photo a fishing pole or a whiskey jack? assets + liabilities = the net worth of a life everything girl clatters past the corner of your eye bangs the photocopier fails to understand the delicate microchip how it functions best when not subject to her violent insistence tall as Jesus flight of fancy she is making the world safe for job costing centering the universe to hover here under diesel your father never held a bird in his hand it's how the wage draws you in each day you become more faxed jokes and girlie pictures why don't women need watches? less from where you were that rocky beach on the banks of a river the last place your mother camped you are of this office beiged and voiceless except for the lilted good morning good afternoon you give good phone on Mondays you reconcile payables your sisters now a vague impression against the beach your are must earn a living this is where you live now you must forget the shape of your mother's sunglasses circa 1961
guys named Bill
guys named Bill traces a journey from childhood to adulthood, through a marriage and beyond. The various characters named Bill are a thread running throughout the book, appearing as turning points in the narrator’s life. Ranging from darkly cynical to intimate, to humorous and blunt, the poems are ultimately optimistic, as the resilient narrator creates a new life from the remnants of the old.
Samples
guys named Bill
Rian and I step off the plane breathing yellow hibiscus tossing alohas to smiling swarthy men they drape us with leis kiss us on the cheek I’m here to recover from Bill shake myself clean at last two weeks in which to re-enter the world prepare myself for the man who waits to buy me dinner on our return I did send Bill a postcard from San Francisco airport – something about a man in a dress I don’t know – it was a layover we were sleep deprived and a little drunk everyone in Hawaii is named Bill we have our pictures taken in Honolulu glorious parrots astride each shoulder the tousled man who chats us up is Bill, the Parrot Guy the bartender at our hotel is Bill – Bill the Bartender he loves us it’s nice to meet a Bill who does he puts extra rum in our Mai-tais we laugh at his jokes and then there’s the night we join a table of singing Australians the dark-haired one with freckles is Bill of the Australian Navy I haven’t kissed a man in almost a year but I’m used to kissing Bills I’ve put away a lot of beer with guys named Bill
Before a Blue Sky Moon
by Weyman Chan
Before a Blue Sky Moon deals with themes of childhood, displacement, loss and redemption both spiritual and secular, the meaning of personal love, and at the same time gives us stunning and magical insights into a Chinese Canadian family.
Awards/Award Nominations
Winner of the Stephan G. Stephansson Award
Reviews
With huge heart, Chan opens the difficult door between languages and lets us into the experience of making not only a life in the intersection of cultures, but of creating a new family from the ashes of the old: A remarkable book that lets you breathe the familiar air differently and new. ~Alberta Book Awards Jury
Sumptuous is the first word of description that comes to mind in describing the aesthetic here… The autobiographical elements … are fresh, and the speaker’s ambiguity in dealing with a mother’s death, estrangement from the father, family breakup, and keeping the children and family together through the bleak passages of life in an orphanage are deeply poignant and moving… This is an excellent first book. ~Richard Stevenson, The Danforth Review (full review)
Chan’s poems speak eloquently and precisely of homesickness, culture shock, loneliness, alienation, uncertainty, abandonment, dilemmas, difficult choices, intergenerational limbo, and the friction of two cultures colliding… Being alive is to suffer, to regret, to rejoice, to learn, and to grow. Weyman Chan is able to express all of that in a natural, uncontrived, heartfelt way. He is not ashamed to openly confess his love… Before a Blue Sky Moon pulses with the thick elixir of lifeblood, and it is a potent and transfiguring concoction indeed. ~Janice Mathie-Heck, filling Station
Chan’s book, Before a Blue Sky Moon, reveals a poet who specializes in evoking the ungraspable. ~Harry Vandervlist, FFWD (full review)
Chan Wee-Meen’s (Weyman’s) Before A Blue Sky Moon offers us a veritable food court of poetry. These poems display impeccable care and choice in their lyric naming of memory, family and place. “I want to describe their loss,” the poet confides, as he narrates flavours of a diasporic sadness where “here” is always an impossible “there”. The particularity of sentiment, recognition and language in this book is impressive in its wise and responsive attention to the self’s hungers. ~Fred Wah
Before a Blue Sky Moon tells a powerful story of family and loss. Whether Chan is writing about his own children, his beloved, the loss of his mother, the estrangement with his father and his father’s past, his lush, sensuous poetry redeems it all. There is nothing contrived here, for he writes with an immediacy, tenderness, and frankness that will move and astound you. This book confidently spans time, geography, cultures, generations and languages, and each poem brims with fresh insights. Chan’s writing is so richly filled with the sights sounds and smells of a living world that this book will leave you feeling hopeful and changed. ~Robert Hilles
Samples
Snow Poem
I want to write a poem about snow and the naming of snow in the word our Step Mom re-trained us to say in Chinese— thloot meaning snow— as she held a piece of beef jerky out for us to say each word of our mother tongue in 1968 we were reclaiming like daylight savings the tongue that would repatriate our love for anyone who dared to marry our father to save his four kids from the foster homes. Dad and Step Mom talked about Heng Ha, the homeland: Sah Vun, Thlum Gup, Bahk Sah jeweled villages on a shepherd’s path to stone-hedged grave markers, each one in the shape of an inverted omega, carved into rainy hillsides. They never saw snow until they came to Canada if your eyes move with it the snow will hold still while the earth meets up with it never to own or to be owned Step Mom warned us about heaven, when we were bad. There’s a heaven, she’d tell us. “Yu-ga hin.” She had eyelashes that seemed the perfect altar of warmth to die on snow is the one thing that holds still while we float free between lattice and rivulet snow is the anchor of our moderation but snow kept her alone in the house constantly sweeping out the grey air yelling at us to step back when we walked in dusted with snowflakes and years later on the morning my mother-in-law died her last eyes looking out followed that gentle whiteout it hushed her breathing and I wondered how anybody could stand open-mouthed looking upward hoping to cradle-catch that illusion of falling into its own vowel—its no, negation, have-not of heaven following the s and if snow could be a poem about the body when in other seasons a fish could dream air out of water or a tree could bend sugar out of light, then snow would talk about disbelief, its six-sided dissolution in the millions proving that the smallest touch lasts why her, why this falcon-like fall from recovery, only to believe with all the science of your heart that all we have is this body this body taken by storms and dart frogs, excoriations that bend leaves at night with our children’s voices crying for us this body caught in the middle distance where life stops freezing or burning and begins to know itself. I skated on the river today amazed that this distance could be mother to water and that water could have made me to remember a word like thloot on a day like today where the sun spoke to me like an old friend— Yes I remember you when you left me yesterday and I’ve slept without you in the world anticipating nothing until now.
From a Call Box: Resource Guide
This Resource Guide has been constructed primarily to satisfy the Alberta Department of Learning Curriculum Guidelines for Grades 7 – 12. Following the strands of listening, speaking, reading, writing, viewing, and representation, the ideas and suggestions focus on these learning outcomes:
- explore thoughts, ideas, feelings and experiences
- comprehend and respond personally and critically to oral, print and other media texts
- manage ideas and information
- enhance the clarity and artistry of communication
- respect, support and collaborate with others
- relate literary experience to personal experience
- differentiate between literal and figurative statements
- understand the use of symbols to express abstract ideas and symbolic meaning
- differentiate between escapist and interpretive literature
In recognition that teaching is an interactive sport, note-taking areas have been provided in each section for the teacher’s assessments, record keeping, and improvements and modifications of the various activities.
Before I retired as Language Arts Supervisor for the Calgary Catholic School District, I contracted with Bob Stallworthy for over 100 poetry workshops in District classrooms. Teachers and students alike applauded Bob’s enthusiasm, skill and practicality. These characteristics also apply to the Resource Guide for From a Call Box. The suggestions will vitalize the reading and writing of poetry for secondary students. The material encourages students to appreciate poetry’s exploration of personal experience and to understand its special qualities of language. For teachers, the guide furnishes clear, engaging activities that can be used no matter how they organize for instruction, whether in genre units or thematic units. The relation of learning outcomes to the various activities will be particularly helpful for planning. I recommend From a Call Box and its Resource Guide without reservation.
Graham Foster
Swallowing My Mother
Catherine Moss is a jeweller of words. Every poem in Swallowing My Mother is carefully crafted and polished, but beneath the polish lies great emotional risk. Whether she is dealing with childhood loss, her passion for gardening, or the many and various exotic places she has encountered, Moss is an artist who is not afraid to expose painful, sharp-edged revelations.
Reviews
Moss … moves slyly from descriptive to declamatory speech, allowing the poems to burrow from straightforward narrative and description to archetypal symbol. I like that: it looks easy, and I know it isn’t. The fact that Ms Moss is well-travelled shows not only in the variety of her landscapes, but in the dexterous camera work. ~Richard Stevenson, The Danforth Review
Moss is a poet whose joy in the variety of language, and the variety of the nature it reflects and shapes, sounds from almost every line. ~Alexander Rettie, Alberta Views
Catherine Moss has an instinct for language, awakening rhythms and images that are at once lyrical and sparse. Swallowing My Mother is an enticing and exciting new book of poetry whose merit lies not only in its literary value, but also in its insightful account of personal and collective experiences. ~Jennifer Bronson, League of Canadian Poets
Samples
Turning Back the Sheets
after the children have gone and dusk settles on urban poplars like hens settle on straw I open the kitchen door and call my grandmother back from memory from the garden from where she once called me she has gathered the hens into their house left them idly questioning their eggs in the early dark hunched over the garden fork (taken to parry the slash of the rooster's claws) she walks back between rows of vegetables digs a dandelion's ivory root from the dark mouth of soil tells herself tomorrow I must pick gooseberries this evening at her walnut desk in the drawing room she will write: dear child after you left I went to change the bed but the sheets were warm and still held the smell of your body in their arms
Static Mantis
by Arran Fisher
Static Mantis is an investigation into our experience of reality, a challenge to the idea that works of fiction, or the fictions that we create for ourselves every day, are required to hold any consistency or similarity to the “real” world. Insects, space travel, the apocalypse and The Beatles swarm in clouds of randomized particles which disperse and settle, showing themselves to be neither more nor less substantial than the simple fact of existence.
Awards/Award Nominations
Shortlisted for the Stephan G. Stephansson Award for Poetry
Reviews
Fisher is obviously enchanted with puns, double meanings and wordplay of all kinds, and the result is hilarious. ~Alexander Rettie, Alberta Views
Fisher has a genuine flair for the sparkling image … his long frequently stream of consciousness passages are peppered with staccato bullets to the brain; in other words images that delight and surprise. ~Angus Leech, Calgary Straight
Like automatic writing, it makes leaps in logic, finds loop holes in meaning, slips from one plane of the real to another through sound, sense and image. ~Kemeny Babineau, League of Canadian Poets
Static Mantis requires a totally different kind of attention — attention to what slips through the lacunae in disjunctive narrative; attention to the non-sequitor; attention to surreal leaps of language and thought. ~Richard Stevenson, The Danforth Review
Samples
Sunlight diffused the buildings…
Sunlight diffused the buildings – a slow motion Xerox making its locust billionth pass as he exited the copy centre. He thought about photocopies and insects the way they reproduce and multiply like downtown buildings bombarded with photons each day like the next instant the sky opened up and either darkness or bits of paper fell upon the city. Like a New York parade or a pause between copies, a lapse between yesterday’s and tomorrow’s edition of scarab billion limited view of the Shriner’s float from this angle.
He couldn’t cross the street because the band marching past just like the present cloudy conditions threatened to rain the plague. He thought about the ants go marching ant by ant, an army of sequence playing “Scotland the Brave” all bagpipes and confetti. An envelope held moth-hundred copies of the manifesto, all about Armageddon between the numbers, the parade, the Sun, the bodies, the copies, the weight of the papers under his arm. Gravity and the one about procession and the roadside attraction.
You don’t have to be a rocket scientist
“You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out why they never admit to the subplot behind the White Album.” Last week it was satellites and how his dog knows when something’s the matter like an atom or the universe, more space than substance, more forest than trees. The antimatter shortage and the big bang conspiracy. “It’s a huge narrative about the rise and collapse of the American dream, from the bubblegum parody of Back in the USSR to the apocalyptic riots in Revolution 9.” Galaxies turn and accumulate, records broken back to records sold. Money makes the world revolt at bumble bee point aphid degrees from the ecliptic – a seasonal angle of insurrection, El Niño formation. “Mild winter but we’ll need five or six chinooks before the snow pisses off.” The insect resuscitation, slower after a record season.
Pattern of Genes
Pattern of Genes examines a life well lived, full of humour and character, but filled also with inescapable losses. These are intensely intimate poems that take us from the poet’s childhood in Winnipeg in the Second World War through her experiences as a Wren in the Royal Canadian Navy and as a traveller. There is a spirit of adventure and romance in her work, a vivid sense of time and place, but there is also a pervading elegiac tone as she copes with bereavement and loneliness.
Reviews
The virtue and reward of the poems is not in the innovative use of form or novel content, but in the dexterous imagistic strokes, the economy of means. Van Stelten knows how to turn a line and how to use the sonic glue of assonance, alliteration, sibilance, slant and full rhyme … to rein in the syllables or loosen the lope of phrase and image as they uncoil down her page. ~Richard Stevenson, The Danforth Review
Van Stelten’s verse is both visually driven, concentrating on the observable, and possessed of a solid aural foundation… The better poems in this collection combine these two virtues to paint exquisite miniatures. ~Alexander Rettie, Alberta Views
Stalwart soul with a twist of romance, Rosalee van Stelten weaves spells with her words. Each poem in Pattern of Genes offers a mirror for emotional reflection and invites contact with the poet as well as with one’s self. Whether she is writing about family, places she has lived and visited, or wrenching personal loss, the poet’s direct language and imagery reach deep. Her humor and wisdom salve tears that the poems invite. ~Nina Krebs, author of Edgewalkers and Changing Woman Changing Work
Samples
Tourist’s Lament
where are the cowboys they promised me strolling the streets of Calgary booted and spurred? where are the horses forsaking trails to terrorize banks and shopping malls leaving deposits no returns? no rogues from the range in vest and chaps just retired oilmen in baseball caps is all I see rhinestone wranglers in designer jeans johnny-come-latelies and might-have-beens desk jockies whose muscles have gone to waist youths and maidens no longer chaste where are the heroes of flint and steel? not at the stockyards making a deal this frustrating quest has left me short-changed in fact, truth to tell I feel quite de-ranged.
In Mona’s Arms
come to your big fat Auntie Mona she would say headlong we rushed into her arms felt laughter rise from belly to bosom while she squeezed all but our last breath in fierce hug of love my mother wrote a romance about this elder sister A beauty much sought after by the opposite sex hid the pages beneath the parlour rug where their discovery triggered loud guffaws for Mona was plain her beauty cupped in a heart fired by love long afterward when cancer had shaved her to a skeletal corpse cousin clung to cousin marvelled that each felt so loved as if she alone had been held in Mona's arms
From a Call Box
Telephone communication is a prevalent subject in From a Call Box, but the real theme is communication between people. Calls for help, calls for information, calls for love, calls of desperation. In the author’s words, “We transfer vast amounts of information via these technologies, as well as the huge range of human emotions. We are not always successful in our attempt to get both emotion and information across to the person on the other end of the telephone line.” From a Call Box is an exploration of people’s funny, poignant, sad, sometimes tragic attempts to make connections.
Reviews
Stallworthy eschews metaphor in favour of the unadorned narrative. As with Tom Wayman, the “I” of Stallworthy’s poems is often that curious but befuddled everyman who smiles inwardly as if to acknowledge the fact that we’re all bozos on this bus, but the sort of guy you trust and want to engage in conversation. Stallworthy is a good deal more economical with his phrasing and scene development than Wayman, and more inclined to keep you waiting for the punch line. His timing is as impeccable as the working class raconteur’s; he knows when the coffee break ends, and how to keep you waiting until lunch. ~Richard Stevenson, The Danforth Review (full review)
For its historical range alone, From a Call Box is an interesting book, but when you add in the variety of human situations Stallworthy explores — a young man rehearsing a call for a date; lost conversations stored like peas in cans in a dead mother’s pantry; a salesman making a “cold call” — you have a must read collection. ~Ronnie R Brown, Canadian Bookseller
From a Call Box is an extended metaphor in which the language of telecommunication is used to talk about the emotional limits of human communication… a valuable addition to the burgeoning literature about the effects, both positive and negative, of technology on our sense of community. ~Alexander Rettie, Alberta Views
Samples
all the words that I know
are stored in a box on my desk it is an ammunition box filled with ideas lying side by side their soft-polished brass casings reflecting light reflecting each other and their hard copper coloured points sharpened to perfection waiting to hit home waiting to sink deep into yielding flesh of another's argument it is a cardboard box packed with black and white words sketches of places I once was might have been now stored on a shelf waiting for me to rediscover them from memory pick through each one decide whether to discard it or put it back and fold the top of the box in on itself it is a heart-shaped box lacy white ribbon on it containing all the sticky-centered words whiffs of warm secrets wishes for touch taste smell promises kissed into the receiver all the words that I am are stored in my telephone waiting for the ring when they will tumble end over end spill out splash onto the desk shelf floor spill out me
The Grass Beyond the Door
The Grass Beyond the Door is a novel based on a true story: Lucy Lightfoot was born in the early 19th Century on the Isle of Wight in the south of England. She was well known in her village for her extreme obsession with the 14th-century crusader Sir Edward Estur, whose carved effigy lay in St. Olave’s Church in the village of Gatscombe.
On June 13, 1831, during the severest storm in the history of the Island, a lightning bolt struck the church shortly after Lucy had been observed going inside. Sir Edward’s dagger was shattered, the jewel from its hilt was gone – and there was not a trace to be found of Lucy Lightfoot. For two years her grieving family searched for her, but she had vanished from the face of the earth. Her disappearance became a local legend, a mystery that would never be solved … until 34 years later, when a newly discovered 14th-century manuscript revealed an incredible story.
This is where The Grass Beyond the Door begins.
Reviews
A very good book. It gets better each time you read it. ~Romance Review, May 2001
The Grass beyond the Door is an enchanting book. I suppose it would be classified as historical romance, but it has an originality and a breadth that make it special. I was particularly struck by the lively and natural dialogue flavoured with dialect, foreign and ancient words yet always seeming to come from living and credible human beings. Another delight are the insights into domestic and social life of a distant past. What a great amount of research must have gone into all that. ~May Griffith
The story Veighey weaves is entertaining and historically correct. Her writing style flows and keeps one turning the pages. ~Valerie Walker
