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Odin: Ecstasy, Runes, & Norse Magic
by Diana L. Paxson“Paxson provides songs, rituals, magical exercises, and practical advice to help you develop your own personal relationship with the Lord of Runes.” —Judika Illes, author of Encyclopedia of 5,000 SpellsOdin is arguably one of the most enigmatic and complex characters in Norse mythology. Revered since the Viking Age, Odin has been called the greatest of the gods—the god of words and wisdom, runes and magic, a transformer of consciousness, and a trickster who teaches truth. He is both war god and poetry god, and he is the Lord of Ravens, the All- Father, and the rune master.Odin: Ecstasy, Runes, and Norse Magic is the first book on Odin that is both historically sourced and accessible to a general audience. It explores Odin’s origins, his appearances in sagas, old magic spells, and the Poetic Edda, and his influence on modern media, such as Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. Each chapter features suggestions for rituals, exercises, and music, so readers can comprehend and become closer to this complicated god.Author Diana Paxson, an expert on Viking-era mythology, provides a complete portrait of Odin and draws on both scholarship and experience to provide context, resources, and guidance for those who are drawn to work with the Master of Ecstasy today.“This remarkable book is at times ribald and reverent, worldwise and innocent, pragmatic and idealistic, as needed to masterfully show the ways of a very complex God.” —Ivo Domiguez, Jr, author of Keys to Perception
Devil in the Woods
by D.A. LockhartA collection of letter and prayer poems in which an Indigenous speaker engages with non-Indigenous famous Canadians. D.A. Lockhart’s stunning and subversive fourth collection gives us the words, thoughts, and experiences of an Anishinaabe guy from Central Ontario and the manner in which he interacts with central aspects and icons of settler Canadian culture. Riffing off Richard Hugo’s 31 Letters and 13 Dreams, the work utilizes contemporary Indigenous poetics to carve out space for often ignored voices in dominant Canadian discourse (and in particular for a response to this dominance through the cultural background of an Indigenous person living on land that has been fundamentally changed by settler culture). The letter poems comprise a large portion of this collection and are each addressed to specific key public figures—from Sarah Polley to Pierre Berton, k.d. lang to Robertson Davies, Don Cherry to Emily Carr. The second portion of the pieces are prayer poems, which tenderly illustrate hybrid notions of faith that have developed in contemporary Indigenous societies in response to modern and historical realities of life in Canada. Together, these poems act as a lyric whole to push back against the dominant view of Canadian political and pop-culture history and offer a view of a decolonized nation. Because free double-doubles… tease us like bureaucratic promises of medical coverage and housing not given to black mold and torn- off siding. Oh Lord, let us sing anew, in this pre-dawn light, a chorus that shall not repeat Please Play Again. (from “Roll Up the Rim Prayer”)
The True Names of Birds
by Sue GoyetteNominated for the 1999 Governor General's Award for Poetry, the 1999 Pat Lowther Award and the 1999 Gerald Lampert Award and Globe 100 book for 1999 The True Names of Birds is the first book-length collection from a voice that has captured the attention of Canadian poetry readers for the last half-dozen years. Deeply centred in domestic life, Goyette's work is informed by a muscular lyricism. These are poems that push the limits, always true to their roots.
Mining For Sun
by John ReibetanzShortlisted for the 2001 ReLit Awards John Reibetanz is good on grief: "You, mother,/ dying, left what was hard first:/ bones weeping into/ / your veins like flutes, teeth/ vanished on some hospital/ lunch tray" This conjunction of a profound sense of loss with the clearest-eyed observation and acceptance of the entropy of the mundane is characteristic. His poetry has a cultural breadth seldom seen in Canadian writing. He sees the pageantry of the Bayeux tapestry with the eyes of a rural quilter, whose son died beneath a tractor, who would focus on "the spear -- strayed from the main design -/ / that takes a wide-mouthed Tabourer aback,/ and recognize the pain/ of someone caught in the wreck/ of a vast, wayward machine." His lucidity and eloquence have earned the praise of such celebrated poets as Richard Howard and Richard Wilbur. But it is always the heart's music which most informs his poetic craft: and that is what keeps it true.
Lost Gospels
by Lorri Neilsen GlennGlenn's new collection confronts the deaths of dear friends and family members, returns to her prairie childhood and youth, and engages hard, hard questions of mortality, and of existence in a world fraught with suffering and violence (both global and domestic). Central is the poetic sequence “A Song for Simone”—a conversation between the poet and French mystical philosopher Simone Weil. Here is poetry reaching out to embrace a manner of being in the world that at once moves beyond the world and engages it fully. Lost Gospels confirms Neilsen Glenn as a poet of maturity, depth and power.
Appetite
by Mia AndersonVerve, energy, wit, piquance and pure linguistic excitement: Mia Anderson's poetry is a whole cookbook of poetic experiences. Anderson is always ready to take big risks, and her work shows her love of life in its manyness and accident, as well as a delight in the intricate prism of language. Appetite includes the long poem sequence "The Saugeen Sonata" which won The Malahat Review's Long Poem Prize in 1988.
Invisible Dogs
by Barry DempsterVirtuosic poems tracking two intertwined themes: the breakdown of an obsessive love affair and the vicissitudes of middle age. Invisible Dogs, Dempster's fourteenth collection, is a complex but deeply coherent hymn to the difficult business of staying alive. This is a book for when it hurts so bad you hope you'll die and are afraid you won't—not because it offers consolation or the promise of a new dawn, but because it so compellingly documents the plain, hard, ungraceful, stumbling grief of the matter, and meets it with rare self-knowledge, wry humour, and an unornamented determination to go on living. Dempster's metaphors are like hairpin turns taken at breakneck speed. He has nerves of steel when it comes to self-examination, and it's this relentless honesty and the emotional torque it induces that keep the voice on the road.
All Our Wonder Unavenged
by Don DomanskiA poet of osmosis explores the implicit relationship between matter and spirit, the interconnectedness of the universe.In his first full-length collection since 1998's Parish of the Psychic Moon, Don Domanski writes with clarity of vision. He is a poet of the holiness of subtleties, a master of mindfulness and being. His writing is a form of osmosis, spirit seeping through the details of each poem, creating a marvel of metaphysics and language distilled to purest energy. Living in the moment here is synonymous with being the moment, a transformation that is stunning to inhabit.
The Family China
by Ann ShinIn The Family China, her second book of poems, Ann Shin examines the decentering experiences of migration, loss and death, and the impulse to build anew. In five suites threaded through with footnote-like fragments that haunt and ambush the text like memories, the book accrues associations, building and transforming images from poem to poem, creating a layered and cohesive collection that asks daring questions about how we define ourselves. These poems grapple rawly and musically with the profound messiness of human relations; their candour consoles and instructs. The quandaries in The Family China are deeply recognizable. Strung up between fragility and resilience, between naïve hope and domestic disillusionment, between an untenable nostalgia for the pastoral and a deep unease with the global, the voice of these poems is nevertheless determined to find some scrap of a song we can sing in common.
A Possible Landscape
by Maureen HarrisMaureen Harris’s first volume of poetry evokes “a possible landscape,” where the stories that subtly shape us blend with the moments that we are. Here is an Eden where Eve longs for the serpent’s “green quiver,” his “sibilant caress,” where a snake tires of his lover “wearing/the same skin day-out, day-in.” The poems in the first section of this book are sharp new takes on old stories, at once angry, witty and thoughtful. With grace, compassion and sparkle, the rest of the book explores the self in the world of the late twentieth century, the seeming contradictions of the third world, and the ordinary magic of an evening spent with friends.
Roaming Charges
by Antony Di NardoA turbulent, celebratory flight from an accomplished witness and journeyman. Antony Di Nardo's third collection of poems occupies the air between Canada and Lebanon, viewer and painting, victim and triggerman, reader and page. Blending a bohemian ebullience with a reporter's obligation to witness, the poems in Roaming Charges are a heady and celebratory bouquet of jet fuel, camaraderie and muezzin music. They look long and hard at their subjects, but also speak of the trails those subjects leave across the skies.
Song of Fear
by A. F. MoritzA. F. Moritz's poems integrate nature and enduring myth with our inner life so movingly, so convincingly, that they almost seem to be our own thoughts. His direct and intimate tone, and the power, calm, and clarity of his expression, are solid foundations for an exhilarating breadth and range of imagination.
The Luskville Reductions
by Monty ReidA book of lyrics, fragmented, extended, and recovered, which read as a single long poem. The Luskville Reductions records a year in the life of a small Quebec town and the marriage that disintegrates there. While a book about loss, it is also a book about the state of becoming that coexists with change, the imbalance that for a time makes everything lucid, all the details adding up to much more than only an "us." The visible goes beyond mere facts in these poems, transformed into the deeply seen - and therefore sacred. The problem with daylilies is the usual contemporary twaddle: how is it we know anything now that you're gone. What do you mean now that you're gone? What do you mean daylilies? "Marry the passionate grief of By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept with the pared-down utterances of Beckett's lost men and you might arrive at The Luskville Reductions. While it evokes the dark cry of the lover in ‘O Western Wind,' this long poem is entirely contemporary in its ontological alertness, its wry ironies. At once threnody and enactment of loss, it brings something utterly new into the corpus of Canadian poetry. It is a brilliantly achieved poem." -- Mary Dalton
The Grey Islands
by John StefflerDeluxe redesign of a seminal book by Canada’s former Parliamentary Poet Laureate.Includes new material. On the occasion of the press's 40th anniversary, Brick Books is proud to present the second of six new editions of classic books from our back catalogue. This new edition of The Grey Islands features a foreword by scholar Adrian Fowler and a detailed and insightful look back at the book and the time of its inception by Steffler himself. Featuring a new cover and design by the renowned typographer Robert Bringhurst. The Grey Islands is the story of one man’s pilgrimage to a remote island of Newfoundland’s northern peninsula. Using a broad range of styles, The Grey Islands delivers the bite of raw experience and embraces existence at the edge in all its terror and beauty.
Wet Dream
by Erin RobinsongWet Dream is an expansive, erotic, and enlivening book of ecological thinking. Wet Dream is an expansive book of ecological thinking for living on a wet planet on fire. Erotic and political, vibrating with pleasures, medicines, and unrest, these poems metabolize toxic logics and traverse enmeshed ecologies through the wetness that connects. A pulse of agency to the heart. "Wet Dream is brain lube for an insurgent language—creaturely poems that remake your body and relation to the world. I want to smear them all over." — Astrida Neimanis, author of Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology
The Dwelling of Weather
by Hilary ClarkShortlisted for the 2003 Anne Szumigalski Award for Poetry and for the 2003 City of Saskatoon Book Award (Saskatchewan Book Awards) Hilary Clark's newest volume of poems shelters a world of stories and poems, of the tricks of language that are the dearest home of a writer. "The hinge," she writes later in "Dwelling", "is attention to the moment, its particular light." And Clark attends with mind acutely tuned, with heart open and eager; she writes with the subtle nuances, the gentle shifts of one who has dwelt long in words and found in them an endless unfolding of possibilities: "each word could be others, thresholds to possible tales" ("Other Worlds"). These poems trace, through their web of reference, a life story of reading -- the Bible, Shakespeare, Blake, Lewis Carroll, and Emily Bronte meet Michael Palmer, Fred Wah, and Robert Duncan -- not just Clark's life story but any reader’s who finds in words a way to lure the spirit homeward.
Hsin
by Nanci LeeNanci Lee’s debut explores 4th Century Su Hui’s palindrome of longing. Hsin arises from an ancient Chinese ethical philosophy, less a set of moral standards than an appeal to tune. Heart-mind and nothingness are fair English translations of Hsin, but their tidiness risks losing some of the sharper, wider sides of absence and appetite. As a historical process, according to Hang Thaddeus T’ui-Chieh, Hsin frustrates, “the psychological fragmentation and compartmentalization of the West.” Born to a Syrian father and a Chinese mother, who gave her up for adoption, Lee explores her origins in a compendium of poem fragments where form embraces the process of its unfolding. These are Koan-like poems, resonant with tones at turns ageless and contemporary; Hsin holds silence in ways that both claim and keep at bay.
Lake of Two Mountains
by Arleen ParéLake of Two Mountains, Arleen Paré's second poetry collection, is a portrait of a lake, of a relationship to a lake, of a network of relationships around a lake. It maps, probes and applauds the riparian region of central Canadian geography that lies between the Ottawa and the St. Lawrence Rivers. The poems portray this territory, its contested human presences and natural history: the 1990 Oka Crisis, Pleistocene shifts and dislocations, the feather-shaped Ile Cadieux, a Trappist monastery on the lake's northern shore. As we are drawn into experience of the lake and its environs, we also enter an intricate interleaving of landscape and memory, a reflection on how a place comes to inhabit us even as we inhabit it.
The Truth of Houses
by Ann ScowcroftWinner of the 2011 Concordia University First Book Prize, Quebec Writers' Federation Literary Awards Poems exploring the idea of home and the difficulties of a deeply ambiguous relationship to that word. At once wise and achingly at a loss, Ann Scowcroft's The Truth of Houses is an elegant debut collection. While very intimate -- even startlingly intimate at times -- the voices of these poems are constantly taking a step backward, wrestling for a measure of distance and perspective. Reading them, we eavesdrop on the uncovering of a personal vernacular that might allow the present to be better lived; we have the sense of overhearing a particular yet eerily familiar inner struggle -- a struggle for insight, for an equanimity with which both narrator and fortunate reader might re-enter life anew.
Other People's Lives: The History of a London Lot
by Chris HutchinsonExciting music, delicious ironies, radiant self-awareness. With imagination, wit and scrupulous candour, Chris Hutchinson’s poems negotiate and renegotiate the shifting no-man’s-land between self and others, introspection and public life. Here are poems carrying unflinching perceptions on their own innovative, edgy music, refusing inflations of rhetoric and complacent notions of the inner life, bringing skeptical intelligence and radical imagination-those supposedly incompatible room-mates-into electrical connection. The result is a poetry of daring honesty, close observation, and humanity, executed with exhilarating verve and humour.
Autowar
by Assiyah Jamilla TouréA visceral, vital, unblinking debut collection of poems exploring kinesthetic memory and longing, inherited violence, and the body as a geographical site. We're often told that we are given only what we can bear. For some of us our first lessons are in how much pain we're made to think we deserve—and the resulting scars are always meant to be kept secret. Assiyah Jamilla Touré's debut collection is a record of those scars—not those inflicted on us by the thousands of little wars we live in everyday, but those that come afterwards, those we inflict upon ourselves to mark the path. Each and every poem in Autowar was written on a cell phone, transcribing an urgent revisiting of old sites of pain, and also a revisiting of one young person’s power and ability—to hurt themself, or others. These poems are powerful evocations of how even our scars have worlds and lives. here in the dark, me-spacei am insatiable for my fleshi just can't get enoughof tiny after-woundsthat's me giving, still too softfor my own teeth
The Sutler
by Michael KenyonIn language at once simple and eloquent, Michael Kenyon's The Sutler charts a falling and a rising, taking the reader through the grief of a failing relationship to the emergence of new possibility. Each poem is a gentleness deeply felt; each embued with a compassion, an honesty both stark and unflinching. Kenyon’s prose has shown him to be a consummate craftsman, and these poems are proof that he is a remarkable poet.
Steam-Cleaning Love
by J. A. HamiltonJ.A. Hamilton distinguished herself with Body Rain (1991) a tough, passionate lyrical book written out of a woman's anger and a woman’s love. Steam-Cleaning Love, Hamilton’s second book of poetry, is "ginger root tough and jelly edgy" -- spicy, sweet, biting; it overwhelms, inundates, the palate. This new book revives the angry, biting, funny, loving, randy voice that won readers to her first volume, but sets that voice in a gentler space. These are passionate poems that celebrate women as friends and lovers, and the beauty, the delight, the desire of women's bodies.
Microphones
by A. R. KazukFrom Microphones there will be no returning to the standard detective story. This long poem/videotext ticks right along on its narrative marginalia alone, but its substance is an interplay of voices and its essence is high-density song.
Pale as Real Ladies: Poems for Pauline Johnson
by Joan CrateIn powerful language that reflects the conflicts between the primitive and the sophisticated, Joan Crate redreams the passions which animated and tormented her famous predecessor. Part white, part Mohawk princess, Pauline Johnson /Tekahionwake would perform her poems first in buckskin, then, after the intermission, in silk.