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Oilywood by Christine Leclerc Poetry 36 pp ISBN 978-1-927751-00-8 @ $10.00
Christine Leclerc is one of the most impressive “committed” poets I know—able to at once convey news that stays news and locate where the heart blooms amidst tottering capitalist machinery. In Oilywood, Leclerc wades into the surf, practicing “another mode of grasping,” listening and recording while her feet go numb, the tankers lumber by, and her phone underwater takes picture after picture. Plans for ever more pipelines, mergers and corporate deals, financed by capital going all-in at the casino’s fossil fuel table, are made all the more pressing and tangible by Leclerc's insistence on the local, her body in these fragile waters, and the interruptions of her non-compliant voice. Stephen Collis
In Oilywood, corporate oil interests Kinder Morgan, El Paso, Eagle Ford and Peabody Energy become dramatis personae, villains in an all-too-real play on the world stage. These characters flaunt an ethic of ‘can implies ought’ with a dispassionate, journalistic reportage, but between their actions a lone voice bears witness to, reflects upon, and implores us to heed the wreckage caused in this epic theatre. This voice sings with vigilant clarity and resolute grace despite such overarching resistance to its song. Leclerc deserves bravos and encores. David Seymour
The Ends by Jen Currin Poetry 36 pp ISBN 978-1-927751-01-5 @ $10.00
The Ends teases out the disappointments and unresolvable aftereffects of loss – grief, heartbreak, forgetting. Currin insists: "Repeat after me:/I am my biography./I am" and later writes, "What is the point of writing a memoir if you have no memory?" Between the pursuit of certain selves and oblivion are the elliptical suggestions these poems offer, quietly challenging the reader with hints of self-deception and attentiveness. In The Ends, hurt is not something to be avoided but to be reached into slowly, like a magician's hat. These poems pause and lament and ask you to listen harder for unexpected sequences: "Once I started drawing. You understand?/I started & I found night." Alex Leslie
In these synaesthesias, where “Storefronts were all glass bakeries,” memory is tripped by the taste of shampoo. In The Ends the generous are still the empty-handed and a speaker, “So bereft, going to lick a hallucination,” asks, what is real. Of these pages Bishop could say: “…each seemed a variation, and yet altogether my eyes were deceived into thinking them perfectly precise and regular... It was as if there were an invisible thread joining all the outside birds and within this fragile net-work they possessed the sky…” This bristly intelligence busts the military to bliss the soldiers. Currin is a poet for this century. Susan Steudel
Carbonated Bippies! by Colin Smith Poetry 36 pp ISBN 978-0-9810952-9-5 @ $10.00
Colin Smith writes what no one else can or will: personal political poetry that is so tough Lenny Bruce might have offered to write this blurb. Michael Barnholden
There’s wronginess all around, mirrors of epic pain in formal tinynesses — in the great poem “Wronginess”: hexametric symmetries of sonnet sound. But also, pulsing, dripping chunks of culture industry served on a bed as mortician’s garnish, by a Satyr, who has on leash an inconsolable Satir-ist reading for quips, mouthing off. Reader, let Colin Smith’s Carbonated Bippies! serve you, frighteningly good fizz, chunk after chunk, all the social registers of the exclamation point between title and “Party (belches)!” To be served politically, Wallace Stevens has had to wait for a majority conservative government in Canada under Stephen Harper, who then had to wait for the — steaming — portraiture in “The Renderer of Cold Ream” — which, surely, you can not wait to be served. Louis Cabri
Actualities by Norma Cole Poetry 20 pp ISBN 978-0-9810952-8-8 @ $10.00
The best way to glimpse the hurtling world may be out of the corner of one’s eye, when the lucidity of wonder reasserts itself. In Norma Cole’s radiant new work, Actualities, a poet’s intelligence courts hazard, misprision and the incisions of the archaic to draw the ear and the eye toward complex, thrilling delight—and a quickening journey through the natural history of perception. Who knew time could be banished and the senses tempted so? I predict that you’ll want to return to Actualities often—even the title is richly layered—and that it will be with growing urgency and admiration. Colin Browne
that stays news by Nikki Reimer Poetry 32 pp ISBN 978-0-9810952-4-0 @ $10.00
Nikki Reimer’s that stays news zings with a raucous riot of voices seen and heard to enact the tensions inherent in the unbearable contemporary moment. She takes apart privilege through “frenetic phronesis” to show how language is both the disease and the cure. Jacqueline Turner
surfing the attention economy, our eyeballs stick to Nikki Reimer's extractions from "this fierce global/ environment." Her strategic refusal of "what liberalism has /wrought" questions pills, power, & people. This is the kind of PPP that might actually make space for the multitudes, rather than evict them. Rita Wong
Lever by Stephen Collis Poetry 36 pp ISBN 978-0-9810952-7-1 @ $10.00
In Lever Stephen Collis continues his lyrical tour de investigation, flinging the machinations of capital accumulation through the fine-net filter of social poetry. A politically and aesthetically complex text, Lever thrums with both music and critique. Collis offers us the material lyric at its best: the entwined rhyme of history and possibility. Beneath the poetry paving stones: solidarity, relation. Jules Boykoff
Sonnets : Louis Labé by Edward Byrne Twenty-four sonnets by the 16th century poet Louise Labé printed in a bilingual edition, with a comment by Edward Byrne 36 pp ISBN 978-0-9810952-6-4 @ $10.00
The high resolution and intense focus of these translations exposes the ditch alongside, between, and across the writing in trans. What is so engaging in Ted Byrne's work here is the careful movement through the morphology of that ditch, its attention detailed in the minute choices of syllable and syntactic intonation. I have heard him describe the form of this writing as the "traduced text ...worn in the suburbs of this discourse." The poems are thus local and sustain a presence of their own making. Fred Wah
The Ends of the Earth by Jacqueline Turner Poetry 40 pp ISBN 978-0-9810952-3-3 @ $10.00
Jacqueline Turner’s work has long impressed with its fine wit and crisp sound textures. She has now gone to the ends of the earth. There, on the furthest extremity, midst the debris of a shipwrecked contemporary world, she writes mash notes to the social heart of language where you/we will either sink or swim—together and alone. “Tantalizing by degrees of omission,” these tiny apertures in the possible lead us towards the minimal light. You/we will fall in love with what is found there, or else lose our way home again. Steve Collis
Turner’s The Ends of the Earth imagines natural erosions and erasures as acceptable and probable at the same time as it refutes a culture of catastrophism and a poetics of evacuation, wherein the subject atomizes away from the densities of daily experience. In this both poignant and wry meditation on the social, addresses are made to requisite shifts of grammar, both in terms of relational enunciations that must be honed and the subject’s fervent readiness for lived and imagined translocations. Margaret Christakos
Aviva by Nicole Brossard trans. by Anne-Marie Wheeler Poetry 48 pp Bilingual Edition ISBN 978-0-9810952-0-2 @ $10.00
The excess Nicole Brossard courts in these desirous pairs of poems plays always on two levels, of and for writing, of and for the aroused lesbian body. And at last we have an exciting translation of L’Aviva in Anne-Marie Wheeler’s poems that capture the musical mirroring and taut semantic play of Brossard’s sequence. Daphne Marlatt
Fulgencio by George Bowering Poetry 36 pp ISBN 978-0-9781072-9-1 @ $10.00
What a necessary poem this is, as USAmericans look for a new President and Cubans without Castro try to keep what they have so hard-won. The grotesque dead hand of Fulgencio Batista y Zaldívar and the deadening grasp of the United Fruit Company, tyrannies of the past right here right now, wrong now, wrong always, implacably here always, the raw sugar of greed lurking beneath the poem’s flat matter-of-fact absurdity, grim comedy’s helpless outrage skittering over monstrous abuse of capital power. Compelling writing, the links between poetry and the political here inescapable. Bowering at his best. Peter Quartermain
Sporatic Growth by Jay MillAr Poetry 28 pp ISBN 0-9781072-3-3; ISBN 978-0-9781072-3-9 $10.00
Here is another tendril breaking through the page. That is to say, no one writes like Jay MillAr. Here, language propagates, perfectly patterned as a leaf on a stem. One would no sooner ask a seed why and where it lands. I love Jay's work. Sporatic Growth is gorgeous to look at...and he makes it look so easy! This latest project reminds me a little of the work of Danish poet Niels Lyngsø: there's the same organic movement between facing pages, that same irreverence—but the vision is pure MillAr. Jay is truly one of the few poets writing in Canada today who can make me howl one moment and stand at attention the next. So funny, and so beautiful. Elizabeth Bachinsky
MillAr is concerned with poetic tradition. And this tradition is the breaking with tradition....This is the poetry of the plenipotential where in secret witness we experience inscrutable otherness. MillAr’s poetry purely states that this is a participatory universe, and within that language is complicit. Kemeny Babineau
Adult Video by Margaret Christakos 26 pp ISBN 0-9735337-7-3; ISBN 978-0-9735337-7-4 $10.00
In the densening recombinations of Margaret Christakos's Adult Video, the poet plays loop-de-loop with a teeming cast of characters, or demi-characters, women with names and families whose outline remains enigmatically opaque. Gertie, Tammy, Meg, Samantha, Elizabeth. It's a world where letters and initials stand in for conjunctions and pronouns; where, as Britney Spears sang, while still a virgin, I'm a slave 4 U. Margaret Christakos, a poet of labour, is in addition a brilliant thinker on sexuality and its uses. Adult Video takes on the antiseptics and anapestics of a male-driven Oulipean procedural vision, and pulls them inside out until, finally, something ratty and valuable lets itself show and moan. Kevin Killian
Cold Trip by Nancy Shaw & Catriona Strang 28 pp ISBN 0-9735337-6-5; ISBN 978-0-9735337-6-7 $10.00
This season offers its coldest pronoun. In the year 2005, the human subject is sold for oil, bound with fear and gagged with dumb longing.
Shaw and Strang loosen the pronominal wire. In Cold Trip, the tragic lyric is resung and unsung. Repetition shifts the I's bind and the subject finds relief in the civic wide surface of words – "each current/ will win me/ each surface also." Each tilting word edge is the subject's end and its agency—the music of identity and its unraveling. So, sing I thus, and in the warmth of the possible and in the sorrow of the uncertainty, "the glowing might be named." Christine Stewart
Ready for Freddy by Renee Rodin 36 pp ISBN 0-9735337-5-7; ISBN 978-0-9735337-5-0 $10.00
Despite having been diagnosed with cancer several months before, my father remained healthy. Sandy and I, Abe's only children, had been told he probably wouldn't last another year but he had not wanted to hear the prognosis. He just kept telling everyone "I'm going to beat it." . . .
Candid and often funny, Ready for Freddy is a story about siblings and their elderly parent. It is riveting and rich -- a new take on a classic theme.
Rewriting My Grandfather by George Bowering 36 pp ISBN 0-9735337-4-9 @ $10.00 A few copies of this are back in stock.
One night in his youth, after a great many beers, George Bowering wrote a poem about his grandfather which has since appeared in countless anthologies. It is not Bowering's favorite poem, by a long shot. Rewriting My Grandfather tells us why this young-man's grandfather poem cannot go on unchallenged, and puts Grandfather through some inventive milling machines.
Weeping Willow by Sharon Thesen 27 pp ISBN 0-9735337-3-0; ISBN 978-0-9735337-3-6 $10.00.
Twelve exquisite poems – wry, gossipy, yet deeply felt – recall long-time friend Angela Bowering.
The Irreparable by Robin Blaser. Articulating philosophy at the core of his poetics, this poem-essay by Robin Blaser considers the work of Giorgio Agamben and others in relation to the terrifying world events of our time. 32 pp Prose ISBN 0-9731521-1-7; ISBN 978-0-9731521-1-1 $10.00.
Who else but a poet, and not just any poet but Canada’s Robin Blaser, could take on that word “transcendence” and recuperate it in the moment of a civic frame, one with the capacity to restore us to the “world” restless in world, the “where is” which is where we abide. If those politicians and armies who use transcendence as motor for religious fundamentalisms would only grasp Blaser’s “transcendence,” thought in the company of Giorgio Agamben, Jean-Luc Nancy and John Berger, the irreparable of this world would be trust and habitation instead of harm.
That transcendence is here and now, is the profane world and its beauty: what a thought. Again Blaser gives courage with his language and care. Erín Moure
A Thousand Mornings. Prose poems about daily life in Vancouver's oldest neighbourhood by Meredith Quartermain. 90 pp ISBN 0-9731521-2-5; ISBN 978-0-9731521-2-8. $10.00.
Meredith Quartermain has really struck gold with A Thousand Mornings, a serious-playful and engaging work in which she weighs and sounds what presents itself outside a real window, inside language, and through verbal-emotional associations. Written in pointillist phrases, diaristic, notational, associative, punning, funning and just following any track, the work sits down to itself: to the world, and to the self in time. It considers all the little bits and details of domestic life and the thinking these can engender. "Looking out of the window of my room is a window looking out my head." This work creates an osmotic border between seeing and writing, a realist hypnogogic passage between memory and today, between outside and inside, between now and then. That anywhere is everywhere is proven once again with this brave, enchanting book. Rachel Blau DuPlessis
Forthcoming: stay tuned for 2014
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P.O. Box 4031
349 West Georgia Street
Vancouver, B.C.
Canada V6B 3Z4
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