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Slovenly Love
by Méira CookLonglisted for the 2004 ReLit Awards Slovenly Love is Meira Cook's third book of poetry. A Fine Grammar of Bones and Toward a Catalogue of Falling, both collections of lyrics, are now joined by a fascinating long poem composed of five sequences. Slovenly Love, in its exhilarating renovation of words and forms, gorgeously confirms that.
Your Last Day on Earth
by Carla HartsfieldLonglisted for the 2004 ReLit Awards Carla Hartsfield sings praises to the unusual: a rose blooming in December; an angel dancing on a cardiologist's scanner; Glenn Gould playing Brahms at Angelo's Garage. But these are common occurrences in Your Last Day on Earth, the everyday world and the metaphysical realm sharing the same ecstatic poem. Hartsfield transforms the contents of her psyche into music that we can all hear, the kind that replays for days in the dark, dreamy parts of our selves.
Could Be
by Heather CadsbyPoems about the unexpected and often wry coincidences language lends to life. In Could be, each poem is a moment of engaged and isolated attention, prodding language, relationships, the mundane aspects of daily life, friendships and art. It asks how we use words, how we shape them and are in turn shaped by them. In many ways, then, this book is about how we construct our world through language, and how language unexpectedly shifts the terms on us. It is wry, funny, moving and at times disturbing. It will quietly assert itself, as so often language itself does, and will challenge readers to reconsider how they engage with words and world.
Angel and the Bear
by Brian CharltonA pinball wizard stars in this urban romance, set where the blues meet jazz in London, Ontario's historic York Hotel.
Inter Alia
by David SeymourShortlisted for the 2006 Gerald Lampert Award Inter Alia is the long-awaited first collection by one of Canada’s most talented young poets. His work has been widely published in journals and was selected by Lorna Crozier and Patrick Lane for Breathing Fire 2: Canada’s New Poets. He is heir to the English metaphysical poets in many of his preoccupations, with a good dash of Robert Bly, but his technique is very much influenced by his interests in Oriental forms – haiku, waka, haibun, etc. Seymour is smart, yes; but this is above all poetry of deep feeling. Its publication marks the appearance of a unique and important new voice in Canadian poetry.
Florida Health Skills for High School: Opportunities Through Physical Education, Reproductive Health, Relationships, and Abstinence
by Catherine A. Sanderson Mark Zelman William BodeThis text includes all of the topics required by the Florida Health and Physical Education Standards—including health influences, goal setting and decision-making, components of fitness, fitness plans, sportsmanship, resiliency, substance use awareness, safety, and disease prevention. The text gives high school students the most current health and fitness information, presented in an engaging writing style students will enjoy reading. The text includes a focus on practical skills that young people can use to develop and promote positive health and fitness habits throughout their lives.
Anthem
by Helen HumphreysWinner of the 2000 Canadian Authors Association Award for Poetry and shortlisted for the 2000 Pat Lowther Award and the 2001 Milton Acorn Memorial People’s Poetry Prize Physical and fiercely lyric, Helen Humphreys' Anthem is a litany of want. A song of poverty and of desire, of the reach forward and the relentless backward glance. With stark images and subtle, tensile strength, her poems touch that rare interval between presence and absence, echo and answer, between wall and window and sky -- that gap in which we live, the space words make.
This World We Invented
by Carolyn Marie SouaidThe world in Carolyn Marie Souaid’s latest collection is both an act of the imagination and a responsibility. Souaid’s poems zoom in and out, shifting focus to accommodate varied dimensions of experience. We move from the breakdown of a relationship to primordial ooze to a suicide bomb to a son doing his math homework. In a disarmingly personable voice, Souaid investigates our darker moments, faces up to losses and failures both intimate and public, often with wry humour. If our world is an imperfect invention, it is also, for Souaid, a source of wonder -- where “the trick was not to fall asleep but to notice everything / in its brevity.”
Monkey Ranch
by Julie BruckWinner of the 2012 Governor General’s Award for Poetry, a Globe 100 Book for 2012, shortlisted for Pat Lowther Memorial Award and CAA Award for Poetry 2013. Comic and sober by turns, these poems ask us what is sufficient, what will suffice? … a mandrill, a middle-aged woman, a shattered Baghdad neighbourhood, a long marriage, even a spoon, grapple with this unanswerable conundrum—sometimes with rage, or plain persistence, sometimes with the furious joy of a dog who gets to ride with his head through a truck’s passenger window. Julie Bruck’s third book of poetry is a brilliant and unusual blend of pathos and play, of deep seriousness and wildly veering humour. Though Bruck “does not stammer when it’s time to speak up,” and “will not blink when it’s time to stare directly at the uncomfortable,” as Cornelius Eady says in his blurb for the book, “in Monkey Ranch she celebrates more than she sighs, and she smartly avoids the shallow trap of mere indignation by infusing her lines with bright, nimble turns, the small, yet indelible detail. Bruck sees everything we do; she just seems to see it wiser. Her poems sing and roil with everything complicated and joyous we human monkeys are.”
News and Weather: Seven Canadian Poets
by August KleinzahlerThis anthology cuts into the Canadian poetry scene on a fresh, oblique angle. Included are Robert Bringhurst, Margaret Avison, A.F. Moritz, Guy Birchard, Terry Humby, Alexander Hutchison and Brent MacKay.
Love Outlandish
by Barry DempsterA love affair chronicled--from obsession to heartbreak, foolhardiness to faith. In Love Outlandish, Barry Dempster undoes all the clichés that have barnacled our love lives and, with the zest and courage typical of his work, explores their torrents and eddies afresh. As in his previous books, Dempster responds to D.H. Lawrence's plea that we should discover and articulate what the heart really wants rather than some idealized version of it. Thoughtful, passionate, full of humour and self-aware wit, Love Outlandish delivers, again and again, the shock of recognition that permits us to laugh at, and with, the very emotions it probes. This is a book to relish for its energy and cherish for its wisdom. My favourite is the one where his lovekeeps trouncing distanceeven after she's gone, making harmonies out of death rattles. It's the crack in his heart where the melody lingers, the hiss of an old 45. How can I help but sing along, hard, hard song, unconditional illusion. --from "Hard Song." "Barry Dempster trains his poetic gaze on the lonely marrow inside love, and blows it wide open."--Jeanette Lynes. "Talk about luscious, limber language! The wonderful poems of Barry Dempster in Love Outlandish extend the possibilities of love lives themselves. What doesn't quite work out becomes, thanks to careful, original imagery and vibrant description, somehow as magnetic and translucent as what does."--Naomi Shihab Nye.
Earth Prime
by Bert AlmonWinner of the 1995 Writers Guild of Alberta Award for Poetry Bert Almon's poems are centred in local, apparently unremarkable moments which are addressed with such a fine, ironic eye that they suddenly yield their innate comedy, tragedy, paradox, tenderness. "Poetry," he has said, "is a message slipped under the door/ You don't even have to read it/ It wants to tell you about danger/ life and death and good parties." In this, his seventh collection, Almon's locales range from the Texas of his youth to the physiotherapist’s office near his present home in Western Canada, through concert halls in London and amphitheatres in Greece.
The Pearl King and Other Poems
by Catherine GreenwoodNotable Book in the 2005 Kiriyama Prize and longlisted for the 2005 ReLit Awards Catherine Greenwood draws on the stories and legends which surround the development of cultured pearls by Mikimoto, the fabulous Pearl King, to engage a rich array of themes, including the clash between an aesthetics of refinement and nuance, and mass manufacture. With discerning wit and a large range of styles and voices, she holds up each subject for contemplation as though it were a pearl, and explores the sometimes bizarre consequences of an overwhelming rage for beauty. As the seal is strong and breathes air, As the fish is quick and breathes water, So make me, a mermaid strong and quick. Bless me with abalone abundant as mushrooms, Oysters dropping ripe as plums into my palm. Let my births keep me ashore a few days only, Only for a little while let labour make me rest. from "The Diving Girls’ Prayer" When, in other sections of the book, Catherine Greenwood turns her attention to such matters as the still birth of a calf, teeth, moles, or the Shetland Island stone, she does so with the same care for the exact fit of style, the same sharply-angled craft. "The ancient Taoists believed that a pearl was grounded at the soul’s centre, that it took wisdom and clarity to create its essence. Catherine Greenwood’s first collection of poems is proof of that. Here is a new pearl, the beginning of a strand I hope, that will continue to be added to with such depth of field and luminosity." - Don Domanski
Robinson's Crossing
by Jan ZwickyThe poems in this book arise from Robinson’s Crossing — the place where the railway ends and European settlers arriving in northern Alberta had to cross the Pembina River and advance by wagon or on foot. How have we crossed into this country, with what violence and what blind love? Robinson’s Crossing enacts the pause at the frontier, where we reflect on the realities of colonial experience, but also on the nature of living here — on historical dwelling itself. In long meditative narratives and shorter probing lyrics, Jan Zwicky shows us-as she has in her celebrated Lyric Philosophy and the Governor General’s award-winning Songs for Relinquishing the Earth — how music means and meaning is musical.
Deeds/Abstracts: The History of a London Lot
by Greg CurnoeBefore his tragic death in 1992, Greg Curnoe had submitted to Brick Books a manuscript based on extraordinarily detailed research into the history of 38 Weston, his address in London, Ontario. The result is a journal/collage that traces the occupancy of that one small plot of land hundreds of years back into aboriginal times when land in this country was not plotted according to the laws of geometry. Deeds/Abstracts is an intensely concentrated and particular cross-section of Canadian history, layer upon layer upon layer. Brick Books is proud to offer this exemplary work-in-progress (a 500-year diary can never be complete) assembled by a much-loved and keenly-lamented Canadian artist of the first importance. Front and back covers are after paintings by Greg Curnoe. The text includes 12 colour plates of photographs and Curnoe paintings.
Botero's Beautiful Horses
by Jan Conn"Every drawer in every chest overflows with illogic and passion." "Do we want love each and every day of our lives?" Jan Conn asks in a poem called Michoac'n. "You bet your ass," she answers. The poems of Botero's Beautiful Horses are charged with otherness, bright with the exhilaration and danger of transformation. Many are descriptions of surrealist canvases, astonishingly kinetic narratives composed by looking hard at unusual pictures, the artists' writings and their circumstances; and letting them speak for themselves. The book becomes a journey away from the familiar into other cultures, especially Latin American. Poem after poem gathers a sense of inner as well as outward journey away from a perilous childhood; into a wide world rich and strange with a recurrent underworld motif of darkness, blackness. But what a black! Rich and various, life as if viewed in the "obsidian mirrors the Aztecs fashioned from the dark."Colours the Aztecs invented: eagle-devouring-snake black expansionist black dried-blood black. They loved the night creatures: owls, scorpions, bats, the Queen of Spiders." --from "People of the Left-Sided Hummingbird." "Jan Conn is a Dali with a scalpel of words, with colourwheels for eyes. To read her is to feel alive, sometimes flayed, but always held in a lush dream replete with flora and fauna every bit as magical as they are real. She is conducting an operation of intelligence and observation, a taxonomy of the senses cooked over flames of Art, embracing the cultures of the Americas."--Marilyn Bowering
In Your Nature
by Estlin McPheePoems that show us a world in which precedent for gender transition is everywhere if you know how to look."I delete my history / badly," writes Estlin McPhee in this searing, witty, lyrical, and elegiac debut collection of poems about intersections of trans identity, magic, myth, family, and religion. The line refers at once to a young person's browser data that reveals an interest in gender transition; an adult's efforts to reconcile complicated relationships; a culture's campaign to erase queerness and transness from the historical record; and a religion's attempt to pretend that its own particular brand of miraculous transformation is distinct from the kind found in folktales or real life. Populated by transmasculine werewolves, homoerotic Jesuses, adolescent epiphanies, dutiful sisters, boy bands, witches, mothers who speak in tongues, and nonnas who cross the sea, this is a book in which relational and narrative continuity exists, paradoxically, as a series of ruptures with the known.
Jaguar Rain: The Margaret Mee Poems
by Jan ConnJaguar Rain is a rare text: at once a book of stand-alone poems and a work of scholarship, with textual notes and bibliography. Written in the voice of Margaret Mee (naturalist, explorer, and painter of flowers in the Amazon between 1956 and 1988), the poems are infused with wonder at a discovered new world of extraordinary richness, which is also an old world still governed by myth, and the ecological interdependence of everything: plant, animal, human, god; the living and the dead. Sources for this collection include Mee’s journals, sketchbooks, and paintings. Jan Conn is a scientist by education and occupation, but biologist meets poet in the deep dive into the soul of the rainforest. She creates the Amazonian world from inside, from her own ardent research travels there, as well as through the sharp eyes of Margaret Mee.
Undone
by Sue GoyetteShortlisted for the 2005 Atlantic Poetry Prize, the 2005 Dartmouth Book Award and the 2005 Acorn-Plantos Award for People's Poetry Undone is a cornucopia of passionate poems arranged into three sections. "Forgotten" has mostly to do with the aftermath of a heart-rending breakup; "Kindred" features poems on fellow artists in poetry, music and painting (ranging from Georgia O'Keeffe to Snoopy, beagle-novelist); in "Apprentice," leaving is transformed into celebration, poem after poem about fierce loving of a world that we will have to leave. In these hard-hitting, highly personal poems, lamentation is a key note. Crushing loneliness weighs heavily on the spirit. But Sue Goyette has ways of sharing pain with a compensating lift: wonderful flights of metaphor, language charged with verbal energy. "Isn’t that our job," she asks, "to coax out the light in the story?" It's a job she takes to heart and performs brilliantly. The poems in Undone have the amplitude proper to "watching wide" -- a discipline good for seeing shooting stars and, as this book illustrates, all other kinds of light in a darkness palpable but never enveloping, not when probed so truly and sung so beautifully.
The Knowing Animals
by Emily Skov-NielsenPoems that sing, in various notes of female voice, the human being as an embodied, contemplative, feeling animal. In Skov-Nielsen's thrumming debut, The Knowing Animals, our consciousness is interconnected with the surrounding trees, bugs, rivers, atmospheres, and cosmos. Here, flowers escape Victorian domestication and ally with girls' green powers of attraction. Here, the social politeness of motherly domesticity and the raw dangers of adolescent sexual awakening are shot through with blood pulsing under the skin, with oxygen exchanged in gasps of breath. Here, everything tender and petalling is also raw and mothervisceral. This is a book of entanglements: the poems twist and turn through a plurality of metaphorical associations involving botany, zoology, astronomy, biology, psychology, and mythology to complicate and expand human conceptions of nature. At the same time, they explore themes such as motherhood, pregnancy and birth, sexuality, adolescence, and the rise of technology, all the while shifting through a variety of tones: romantic, mythological, religious, scientific, wistful, and playful.
This Brighter Prison: A Book of Journeys
by Karen ConnellyIn her first book of poetry since The Small Words in My Body, which won the Pat Lowther Prize for 1990, Karen Connelly writes, in the tradition of the writer-adventurer, of vivid encounters and reflections abroad and at home, continuing her pursuit of "living knowledge of the world." These poems enact journeys of the body and heart with candour and sensuous grace, catching the very texture of human experience in the lithe, muscular lines which have a cat-like metaphorical reach.
A Really Good Brown Girl: Brick Books Classics 4
by Marilyn DumontOn the occasion of the press’s 40th anniversary, Brick Books is proud to present the fourth of six new editions of classic books from our back catalogue. This edition of A Really Good Brown Girl features a new Introduction by Lee Maracle, a new Afterword by the author and a new cover and design by the renowned typographer Robert Bringhurst. First published in 1996, A Really Good Brown Girl is a fierce, honest and courageous account of what it takes to grow into one’s self and one’s Metis heritage in the face of myriad institutional and cultural obstacles. It is an indispensable contribution to Canadian literature.
Summer Grass
by Marianne BlugerWinner of the 1993 Archibald Lampman Award and shortlisted for the 1992 Pat Lowther Award Summer Grass follows Marianne Bluger's previous Brick books, On Nights Like This (1984) and Gathering Wild (1988). The two movements of Summer Grass, between them, comprehend the darknesses of "County Dire" and the depths of contentment in love and in home among the other (animate and inanimate) members of earth. Not literature, these poems are "uttered deeds." They probe "midnight gravities" with a light-suffused language born of faith.
The Secret Signature of Things
by Eve JosephMuch of this poised and luminous book is rooted in an idea of epiphany, an aesthetic of everyday incarnation; not the sudden and profound manifestation of essence or meaning, but the smaller steps taken toward it. The moments in which, as Joyce writes, “the soul of the commonest object…seems to us radiant.” If epiphanies are for theologians, perhaps the little steps towards them are for poets like Eve Joseph, and for all of us who attempt to see beyond the names we give things to the names they give themselves.
Midland Swimmer
by John ReibetanzReading John Reibetanz, one is struck with the way language, closely attended to, kept oiled and sharp, can give experience back its bite. And conversely, how experience can be the whetstone for language, chastening its presumptions and requiring from it fresh exactitudes of music and insight. Whether the subject is a cord of wood, a painting, or the New York Times (deeply and dancingly read) John Reibetanz brings a nearly invisible craft into close attunement with the details of life, hearkening with words. Again and again the glass slipper fits the foot.