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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.
Worn Thresholds
by Julie BerryReading Julie Berry's poetry means entering a new poetic space, crossing thresholds of pain and delight at once raw and refined. "like marie d’oignies who buried bloody/ mouthfuls of herself/ in the garden/ i need my poems to be like this," Berry writes in "Touching Ground." "Like this" is finely-turned and constantly surprising, haunting as plainsong, throaty as the blues. Her images are so completely unexpected and yet so thoroughly right that you are left wondering why you never imagined "the minute hand [falling] into the refrigerator and breakfast/ . . . clattering across the lawn/ its spoons and bowls and burning toast." Her eye is keen and quirky; its wide embrace enfolds the highways and cemeteries of southwestern Ontario, flying pianos, her lover's ex-neck, Elizabeth Graves Simcoe, furniture cleaners, suicides and mass strandings. And of course her reader. Here is a poet whose honesty and wry humour loosen the tangles of the heart.
awâsis – kinky and dishevelled
by Louise Bernice HalfeWinner, 2022 Saskatchewan Book Awards, SK Arts Poetry Award Honouring Anne SzumigalskiLonglisted 2022 Pat Lowther Memorial AwardShortlisted 2022 Raymond Souster AwardCBC Books’ Best Canadian Poetry of 2021A gender-fluid trickster character leaps from Cree stories to inhabit this racous and rebellious new work by award-winning poet Louise Bernice Halfe. There are no pronouns in Cree for gender; awâsis (which means illuminated child) reveals herself through shape-shifting, adopting different genders, exploring the English language with merriment, and sharing his journey of mishaps with humor, mystery, and spirituality. Opening with a joyful and intimate Introduction from Elder Maria Campbell, awâsis – kinky and dishevelled is a force of Indigenous resurgence, resistance, and soul-healing laughter. If you’ve read Halfe’s previous books, prepared to be surprised by this one. Raging in the dark, uncovering the painful facts wrought on her and her people’s lives by colonialism, racism, religion, and residential schools, she has walked us through raw realities with unabashed courage and intense, precise lyricism. But for her fifth book, another choice presented itself. Would she carve her way with determined ferocity into the still-powerful destructive forces of colonialism, despite Canada’s official, hollow promises to make things better? After a soul-searching Truth and Reconciliation process, the drinking water still hasn’t improved, and Louise began to wonder whether inspiration had deserted her. Then awâsis showed up—a trickster, teacher, healer, wheeler-dealer, shapeshifter, woman, man, nuisance, inspiration. A Holy Fool with their fly open, speaking Cree, awâsis came to Louise out of the ancient stories of her people, her Elders, from community input (through tears and laughter), from her own full heart and her three-dimensional dreams. Following awâsis’s lead, Louise has flipped her blanket over, revealing a joking, mischievous, unapologetic alter ego—right on time. “Louise Halfe knows, without question, how to make miyo-iskotêw, a beautiful fire with her kindling of words and moss gathered from a sacred place known only to her, to the Old Ones. These poems, sharp and crackling, are among one of the most beautiful fires I’ve ever sat beside.” —Gregory Scofield, author of Witness, I Am “Louise makes awâsis out of irreverent sacred text. The darkness enlightens. She uses humor as a scalpel and sometimes as a butcher knife, to cut away, or hack off, our hurts, our pain, our grief and our traumas. In the end we laugh and laugh and laugh.” —Harold R. Johnson, author of Peace and Good Order: The Case for Indigenous Justice in Canada “This is all about Indigenizing and reconciliation among ourselves. It’s the kind of funny, shake up, poking, smacking and farting we all need while laughing our guts out. It’s beautiful, gentle and loving.” —Maria Campbell, author of Halfbreed (from the Introduction) “There really isn’t any template for telling stories as experienced from within Indigenous minds. In her book awâsis – kinky and dishevelled, Cree poet Louise Bernice Halfe – Skydancer presents a whole new way to experience story poems. It’s kinda like she writes in English but thinks in Cree. Lovely, revealing, funny, stunning. A whole new way to write!” —Buffy Sainte-Marie
Body Rain
by J. A. HamiltonShortlisted for the 1991 Pat Lowther Award In J.A. Hamilton's poems blood is red, black hearts are black. There is no flinching from things as bad as they can be, especially but not only for women. And yet, this passionate powerful writing radiates affirmation. "his good o, good old world" is livable still in acts of pure verbal magic.
Burning in This Midnight Dream
by Louise B. HalfeA deeply scouring poetic account of the residential school experience, and a deeply important indictment of colonialism in Canada. Many of the poems in Louise Halfe's Burning in This Midnight Dream were written in response to the grim tide of emotions, memories, dreams and nightmares that arose in her as the Truth and Reconciliation process unfolded. In heart-wrenching detail, Halfe recalls the damage done to her parents, her family, herself. With fearlessly wrought verse, Halfe describes how the experience of the residential schools continues to haunt those who survive, and how the effects pass like a virus from one generation to the next. She asks us to consider the damage done to children taken from their families, to families mourning their children; damage done to entire communities and to ancient cultures. Halfe's poetic voice soars in this incredibly moving collection as she digs deep to discover the root of her pain. Her images, created from the natural world, reveal the spiritual strength of her culture. Originally published in 2016 by Coteau Books, Burning in This Midnight Dream won the Indigenous Peoples' Publishing Award, the Rasmussen, Ramussen & Charowsky Indigenous Peoples' Writing Award, the Saskatchewan Arts Board Poetry Award, the League of Canadian Poets' Raymond Souster Award, and the High Plains Book Award for Indigenous Writers. It was also the 2017 WILLA Literacy Award Finalist in Poetry. This new edition includes a new Afterword by Halfe. “Burning in this Midnight Dream honours the witness of a singular experience, Halfe’s experience, that many others of kin and clan experienced. Halfe descends into personal and cultural darkness with the care of a master story-teller and gives story voice to mourning. By giving voice to shame, confusion, injustice Halfe begins to reclaim a history. It is the start of a larger dialogue than what is contained in the pages.” —Raymond Souster Award jury citation
How to Avoid Huge Ships
by Julie BruckBoth “grave and brave, serious and hilarious”—new poems from a Governor General’s Award–winning poet.
Vox Humana
by E. Alex PiercePoems of great passion and tenderness, as close to rapture as a writer can get and still hold on. E. Alex Pierce's voice can be heard echoing down the long corridors of memory and myth. It's not that these poems live in the past; instead, they manage to bring it back to life with uncanny sensual details and an urgency that makes you realize some fires never really go out. Vox Humana is all lilt and discipline in its courtliness, its surrender to the theatre of the moment at its most alive.
Astatine
by Michael KenyonAstatine is an Italian girl, who like Dante's Beatrice, haunts the narrator of Michael Kenyon's incandescent fourth book of poetry. Named after a radioactive element whose isotopes endure half-lives of mere seconds, she is simultaneously a disappearing and abiding presence who cajoles and comforts, who questions and points, who often leaves the poet puzzled, electrified, heart-broken, and wanting more. Astatine is Kenyon's meditation on the evanescent and persevering tragedy of our lives on Earth. He takes us on an inspirational journey through time that embraces all we are born to and must too soon let go of, even as we make peace with the ever-changing fortunes of existence, even as we come upon unexpected joy.
The Fat Lady Struck Dumb
by David Waltner-ToewsOn the day that David Waltner-Toews' young daughter Rebecca gave "Mr. Fluff, that venerable stuffed dog" to her older brother, the poet learned a lesson in community building -- to get what you really want you must give it away and then share it back. There is nothing didactic about The Fat Lady Struck Dumb, though the book is packed with wisdom compacted of love for the planet and detailed knowledge of its ecosystems, including the stress they currently suffer. These are passionate poems of a committed citizen ardently testifying for the globe, his home and ours. One of his recurrent techniques is the catalogue in which layers of global being are rounded. Waltner-Toews is a scientist by education and occupation. He understands better than most our tenuous place in the web of being. His poems are organisms rooted in that knowledge, gifts of language bound to call out of his readers a passionate return in kind.
Going Around with Bachelors
by Agnes WalshShortlisted for the 2008 Pat Lowther Award and the 2009 Heritage and History Book Award [Writers Alliance of Newfoundland and Labrador], nominated for LGBT Poetry (2008 Lambda Literary Awards) and longlisted for the 2008 ReLit Awards The spirit of the departed -- source, origin, heritage, history -- is the essence of this book, rich with the tang of Newfoundland speech. Agnes Walsh's first book, In the Old Country of My Heart, is one of the most read and best loved books of poetry to come out of Newfoundland. Going Around with Bachelors continues and extends Walsh’s distinctive subject matter: the past in the present, Ireland and Portugal in Newfoundland, weather internal and external, the Cape Shore. Here are poems of place and of people in place, of family both immediate and extended. They are also absolutely contemporary poems by a poet, gifted with a remarkably flexible and distinctive voice, who is planted, in her own words, "straight up and down into what’s new."
Careen
by Carolyn SmartBonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow are the stuff of legend -- why tell their story again? Chances are you don’t know the nuances -- their love story and that of their accomplices Buck Barrow and his wife Blanche; their aspirations, conflicts and prayerful natures; and ultimately the sources of their tragedy. At its core, Careen is a long poem spoken by the characters, though the voices are companioned by newspaper articles often ironically at odds with the inside story. Smart lets the principal actors relate their own tale -- a book of voices speaking out of the desperate Dirty Thirties.