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THOT-J-BAP by Renée Sarojini Saklikar Poetry 40 pp ISBN 978-1-927751-07-7 @ $10.00
Like the bees who populate it, Saklikar’s THOT-J-BAP is humming, productive, and vital, performing an urgent gathering of specimens amassed, dissipated, and recollected from which it extracts “those gems they would steal”: fragments of stories, of love, of violence, of remembering, of “what once was, compressed.” This is fecund, fabulous work. Catriona Strang
I always have my eye out for a truly ambitious poetry—and here it is, epic in scope, running through its own newly-created dimension just outside of recognizable time and space, a mobile world moving by, line by line, touching “what hurts, what helps, what heals,” transformed. Saklikar manages a near perfect merger of forward-momentum narrative and paratactic detail where each word is a hypnotically pronounced incantation, the story pulled into glittering erotic fragments, each piece a world in itself, glowing, refracting, the ambition of the part to overwhelm the whole. THOT-J-BAP is poetry to lose and find yourself in. I’m hooked. Stephen Collis
My Model Poem by Marguerite Pigeon Poetry 36 pp ISBN 978-1-927751-06-0 @ $10.00
My Model Poem opens in "a conspiracy of fabric and design," a ruby-studded, feather-booted Alexander McQueen fever dream. From catwalk performance, Pigeon turns abruptly inward, to the model's sense of detachment and unease. She takes us into city streets where luxurious clothes have been produced and displayed, denied to some and sold to others, from indigenous fur traders to covetous settlers, to the rise of New York department stores and "the close air of women's history...eyes trained to see desire boxed and neatly (nearly) theirs." Memorable encounters with ghosts of taste and rebellion explore how historic relations of power and aesthetics give rise again and again, with impeccably cut cloth and sharp lyrical turns, to seductive new forms. Rahat Kurd
What a dazzling conceit Marguerite Pigeon has fashioned in her doubling of “model” and “poem,” both subjected to the judgements of style, taste, and trend. As readers/spectators, we observe the Model Poem, primped and manhandled, assume the catwalk, suffer criticism, and undergo an independent errand of “retail therapy,” itself an instance of hidden (or obvious) corporate machinations. Marguerite Pigeon’s “model poem” is a uniquely brilliant allegory of the situation of the poet within contemporary cultural critique. Sharon Thesen
The Odes by Christine Stewart Poetry 36 pp ISBN 978-1-927751-04-6 @ $10.00
With this book Stewart gives us Odes, extramental unearthings making it impossible not to open to her orbital angular moments. As these songs give pause, we learn how to hear the distances by way of Stewart’s gorgeous lunar disking which further reveals an uncanny turning ever more canny when left unconditioned. Odes is also a report on how goes the civil broil wherein no soul saw itself. Lissa Wolsak
In The Odes, Stewart traces the lineage of the ode, lionized by the masculine canonicals of romantic antiquity. With didactic gusto, in a voice that both witnesses and translates, she confronts the affective turbulence of the lyrical body. The resulting network of poetic sons, a joyful offspring of this deconstructive labour, sings the affective adolescence of poetic expression. Tomasz Michalak
Two at High Noon by Brian Dedora Poetry 36 pp ISBN 978-1-927751-05-3 @ $10.00
In Two at High Noon, Brian Dedora creates an intense collision between philosophy and flesh, delphinium and shadow, sex and birth, fine porcelain and the vast, crashing oceans of our pasts . . . . Continuing his project of constantly shifting the aperture of attention – from micro to macro, from the focused breath of alert perception to the earthly heaven bodies long for – Dedora brilliantly weaves an intricate landscape of sensibility, the urge to justice, and fine, precise, passionate language that makes us want to know, and live, and be more human. Bev Daurio
In this opaque, atmospheric diptych, Brian Dedora implies a reckoning. Personal and visceral musings attempt to pin down the lasting implications of seminal events imbued with sexual shadings. In verse and poetic prose, and with a diction that is understated, at times lyrical, and that draws on a phanopoeiac overlay, the speaker unveils an engaging intimate web that invites rereading to probe its mysteries. Steven Ross Smith
Notes from Gethsemani by Phil Hall Poetry/essay 36 pp ISBN 978-1-927751-02-2 Shortlisted for the 2015 bpNichol Chapbook Award
In this thoughtful essay-poem, Phil Hall has built, seeming by hand, a poetics of the artifact. Here the writer and the mechanism of publishing and distribution are joined once again, perhaps at the hip, or with a squeaky hinge. Readers will be made to be writers reminded of the physical act that thought and mark-making embodies and writers will be made to be readers forced to consider the uniforms their work wears as it calls out to the world seeking attention. Jay MillAr
We discover in Hall, not the argumentative but the “embodied involvement” of a parallel universe, the overturning and reopening of our own. From a squashed bug on a page to the skein of conditioned existence to the synaptic gaps in a digital age of “words that weigh nothing,” his purpose is “to contradict the semblance,” to impact rather than honor any trumped-up (writer/reader) pact. To read Hall is to experience authenticity over authority, to efface the somber sacrosanct, and (above all) to get the imps pulsing through the blood again. Listen to his attentive to. Lary Bremner
Oilywood by Christine Leclerc Poetry 36 pp ISBN 978-1-927751-00-8 @ $10.00 (Winner of the 2014 bpNichol Chapbook Award) To order this book, please contact Christine Leclerc at xineleclerc@gmail.com
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
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
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
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.
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: TBA
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