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Directing Herbert White
by James FrancoThe debut poetry collection by the actor, director, and writer James FrancoI’m a nocturnal creature,And I’m here to cheat time.You can see time and exhaustionTaking pay from my face—In fifty yearsMy sleep will be death,I’ll go like the rest,But I’ll have playedAll the games and all the roles. —from “Nocturnal”“There’s never been a book quite like this. Hollywood — fame, celebrity, the promise of becoming an artist — is the beast at its center. Franco knows it like Melville knows whaling. Hollywood in this book devours its young. Obsessed with myths about its own past, it can be survived only by finding a vantage point that is not Hollywood. Bold yet subtle, fearless yet disarming, Franco has made a book you will never forget.” — Frank Bidart, winner of the Bollingen Prize in American Poetry“A star-studded cast moves like ghosts across the screen of James Franco’s poetic consciousness, imbuing the writing with scenes of icons who are also humans replete with sorrow and presence in our own psyches. James Dean, Monica Vitti, Catherine Deneuve, Sal Mineo, Heath Ledger, pass and fade. The author has a wonderful self-reflexive insouciance about his own fame and roles inhabited, from Hart Crane to Allen Ginsberg to Harvey Milk’s lover. Franco is a gifted contemporary Renaissance kind of guy, surveying the waterfront of illusion, suffering, and impermanance. We leave the movie theater a little wiser.” — Anne Waldman, poet, editor, scholar, and cultural/political activist
Disturbing the Buddha
by Barry DempsterDisturbing the Buddha, Barry Dempster's fifteenth collection, is disarmingly conversational and, like the best conversations, it moves between reverence and irreverence, sincerity and irony as it grapples with love, loss, loneliness and simple lack of luck--the "three-leaf clovers" so much more plentiful than the four. Dempster's wit and playful metaphoric turns let us take for granted the courage needed to admit to lif'’s ongoing intensities, disruptions, and indignities. In these poems, a forty-year-old man dons a pink plastic crown on his niece's order; a solitary man watches a Nicole Kidman rom-com with his cat; an aging Aphrodite, more mortal than god, suffers hot flashes. Like the mystic poets he addresses in the book’s final section, Dempster respects the unknown as he comes to terms with the ups and downs of the all-too-human condition. Shifting effortlessly from light-hearted ode to solemn elegy, Dempster offers no touch-up jobs; instead we find a love of the flaw, a generosity toward it even as he exposes it. This is a poetry of inclusiveness, engaging both our better and worse angels, baring its Achilles' heel and trusting us to do likewise.
Domestic Economy
by John DonlanA sequence of fifty dated poems, four quatrains each; lyrical arguments; quick thinking amid the rational absurdity of everyday machinery; intuitive explorations of unknown energies; a diary of the unconscious.
Dread Poetry and Freedom: Linton Kwesi Johnson and the Unfinished Revolution
by David AustinSince the 1970s, poet Linton Kwesi Johnson has been putting pen to paper to refute W.H. Auden’s claim that “poetry makes nothing happen.” For Johnson, only the second living poet to have been published in the Penguin Modern Classics series, writing has always been “a political act” and poetry “a cultural weapon.” In Dread Poetry and Freedom David Austin explores the themes of poetry, political consciousness, and social transformation through the prism of Johnson’s work. Drawing from the Bible, reggae and Rastafari, and surrealism, socialism, and feminism, and in dialogue with Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon, C.L.R. James and Walter Rodney, W.E.B. Du Bois and the poetry of d’bi young anitafrika, Johnson’s work becomes a crucial point of reflection on the meaning of freedom in this masterful and rich study.
Dream of No One but Myself
by David BradfordAn expansive, hybrid, debut collection of prose poems, self-erasures, verse, and family photo cut-ups about growing up in a racially trinary, diversely troubled family. Dream of No One but Myself is an interdisciplinary, lyrical unravelling of the trauma-memoir-as-proof-it's-now-handled motif, illuminating what an auto-archival alternative to it might look like in motion. Through a complex juxtaposition of lyric verse and self-erasure, family keepsake and transformed photo, David Bradford engages the gap between the drive toward self-understanding and the excavated, tangled narratives autobiography can't quite reconcile. The translation of early memory into language is a set of decisions, and in Dream of No One but Myself, Bradford decides and then decides again, composing a deliberately unstable, frayed account of family inheritance, intergenerational traumas, and domestic tenderness. More essayistic lyric than lyrical essay, this is a satisfyingly unsettling and off-kilter debut that charts, shapes, fragments, and embraces the unresolvable. These gorgeous, halting poems ultimately take the urge to make linear sense of one’s own history and diffract it into innumerable beams of light.
Dreamcraft (Hugh MacLennan Poetry Series)
by Peter Dale Scottso the long stretch of life / reveals its curvature / by those widely separated // moments when we are / brushed / by this awareness // of an other / that we do not knowIn his latest collection of poems, poet, deep state researcher, and radical medievalist Peter Dale Scott interrogates topics that have occupied his later thought and writing, such as moreness (our need, as humans, to be more than we are), minding, and enmindment (the generative synergy, engaging both hemispheres of our bicameral mind, of intellectual and spiritual enlightenment, now out of kilter).In pursuit of these themes, Scott’s voice ranges far, from engaging with poets of the past and, hopefully, the future to critiques of coercive political power, from elegies for important figures in his life – Leonard Cohen, Daniel Ellsberg, Czeslaw Milosz, and Robert Silvers – to fan letters for “minders” Chelsea Manning and Dr Christine Blasey Ford.Dreamcraft is a book that crosses distances and straddles boundaries, moving from whistleblower law to the mimetic properties of DNA, from “the entropic spread / of the drifting cosmos / after the big bang” to “the push of lawn grass / under foot.”
Drift: Poems
by Kevin ConnollyWhat are we thinking at any given moment? What happens to a thought as that moment, on its way to oblivion, collides with its successor? Rambunctious, witty, joyous, and bittersweet, drift is an investigation conducted by a truly unfettered imagination. In fluid, sparkling cadences, Kevin Connolly's poems let the mind's downtime have the stage for a change -- the desert sky transformed; Spring Break as viewed by passing skipjacks; narratives of danger and dream narrative; a meditation on the business end of a sea cucumber; figures of history disfigured and left to wander the consumer grid -- such are the entirely odd, entirely current events in Connolly's world, a realm that stands at an acute angle from the place we normally live in but which we all seem to drift into. As one of Connolly's own high-voltage sonnets states, what stops the heart starts the world. In drift's constant juxtaposition of abundance and loneliness, we hear what it is to confront a new century, having quite likely failed during the last. We're reminded, by a voice unlike any other on the Canadian landscape, that our solitude is painful yet precious.
Dust Blown Side of the Journey (Hugh MacLennan Poetry Series)
by Eleonore SchönmaierAt times apocalyptic and other times passionate and intimate, Eleonore Schönmaier’s poems show the beauty of the lived and natural world in both wilderness and urban settings. A woman hides her love letters in beehives, a cherry tree in full blossom is transported horizontally on a bike, and three crows tap their beaks on a metal door. A grandmother gestures how birds once flew in blue skies, public smiles are outlawed, and a shot-down jet lands in a field of wildflowers. Men from warm countries wear big coats and are falsely suspected of hiding bombs, an Indigenous man is forced by police into the trunk of a car, and a stork lands in prison under charges of espionage. In Canada, the northern village of Paradise is under evacuation orders, and in Europe Desmond Tutu steps down from a podium into a crowd of photographers. Over a Belgian lunch Frederic Rzewski talks about his piano concerto A Dog’s Life, and a Dutch dinner is shared with a young refugee boy who laughs joyously. Reflecting a childhood in the northern Canadian boreal forest, combined with an adult life lived without borders, Eleonore Schönmaier’s vivid and sensual language invites the reader to fully join in and enjoy the journey.
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.
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.
Earth Words: Conversing with Three Sages (Hugh MacLennan Poetry Series #64)
by John ReibetanzThe leaves of paper / butterfly-wing thin / let light stream through / only one side of each.If “poetry is what we do to break bread with the dead,” as Seamus Heaney put it, Earth Words breaks bread with three earlier writers through the glosa, a poetic form that unfolds as a dialogue. The collection inscribes a series of concentric circles, moving outwards from the eleventh-century world of Wang An-shih through the nineteenth century of Henry Thoreau and into the twentieth century with Emily Carr.Though the environmental and political problems of the twenty-first century feel unique, the figures in this book are met with similar challenges. Wang’s writings embody an ideal relationship between self and nature, preserving a sense of rootedness in times resembling the upheavals of the Trump era. This relationship is confirmed in conversations with Thoreau, whose closeness to nature provides an antidote to our age’s dependence on digital forms of communication. He also grapples with slavery and the failure to respect the full humanity of Indigenous peoples, struggles that ripple out into the present. Carr’s writings and art enter into Indigenous cultures and witness the enduring value of their way of looking at nature. She realizes that the impulse to creatively express one’s being runs through the entire natural world.Culminating in this realization, the concentric circles of Earth Words broaden out to include its twenty-first-century readers as well as its writers in a vision of creative growth.
Edge Effects
by Jan ConnReading Edge Effects, Jan Conn’s masterful eighth collection, is a little like looking at Edward Burtynsky’s photographs of real industrial wastelands; both visions are as gorgeous as they are terrifying, platforms for thought, even for activism, depending as they do on the energy of the viewer/reader for completion.
Elementary Particles
by Sneha Madhavan-ReesePart family history, part scientific exploration, Elementary Particles examines the world through the lens of a daughter grieving the loss of her beloved father. Through keen, quiet observation, Sneha Madhavan-Reese's evocative new collection takes us from the wide expanse of rural India to the minute map of Michigan we carry on the palms of our hands. These poems contemplate ancestral language, the wonder and uncertainty of scientific discovery, the resilience of a dung beetle, the fleeting existence of frost flowers on the Arctic Ocean. The collection is full of familiar characters, from Rosa Parks to Seamus Heaney to Corporal Nathan Cirillo, anchoring it in specific moments in time and place, but has the universality that comes from exploring the complex relationship between a child and her immigrant parents, and in turn, a mother and her children. Elementary Particles examines the building blocks of a life — the personal, family, and planetary histories, transformations, and losses we all experience.
The End of Travel
by Julie BruckWith crisp, elegant language, sharp wit and resonant images, Julie Bruck's new book gentles the largesse of life out of its many smallnesses. The way a straw buoys up in a can of pop, or a friend’s dress holds her shape, even on its hanger: Bruck textures her poetry with a life "you could close your hand around." Bruck's is the urban world so many of us walk through, eyes closed. But Bruck's eyes are wide open, keen and collecting. With teeth and heart, she cracks open the ordinary to reveal life’s love and loss, joy and fragility, its extraordinary fullness.
Everything, Now
by Jessica MoorePart lyric, part memoir, Everything, now, Jessica Moore’s heart-rending debut, describes an untimely death and the journey of going on alone. The book stares down loss and struggles to transform that loss into language that can pass through boundaries of intricate sorrow; the act of translation here is not about two different languages—although Moore uses her own translation of Jean-François Beauchemin’s Turkana Boy as a template for translating death into life, past into present—but about the necessity to put the inexplicable into words that might hint at its intensity.
Explosion at the Poem Factory
by Kyle LukoffA funny story, full of wordplay, brings poetry alive as never before! Kilmer Watts makes his living teaching piano lessons, but when automatic pianos arrive in town, he realizes he’s out of a job. He spots a “Help Wanted” sign at the poem factory and decides to investigate — he’s always been curious about how poems are made. The foreman explains that machines and assembly lines are used for poetry these days. So Kilmer learns how to operate the “meter meter” and empty the “cliché bins.” He assembles a poem by picking out a rhyme scheme, sprinkling in some similes and adding alliteration. But one day the machines malfunction, and there is a dramatic explosion at the poem factory. How will poetry ever survive? Kyle Lukoff’s funny story, rich in wordplay, is complemented by Mark Hoffmann’s lively, quirky art. The backmatter includes definitions of poetic feet, types of poems (with illustrated examples) and a glossary of other terms. An author’s note explains the inspiration for the story. Key Text Features definitions glossary author's note Correlates to the Common Core State Standards in English Language Arts: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.2.4 Describe how words and phrases (e.g., regular beats, alliteration, rhymes, repeated lines) supply rhythm and meaning in a story, poem, or song.
Eyes Like Pigeons
by Roberta ReesCo-winner of the 1992 Gerald Lampert Award. Winner of the 1992 Writers Guild of Alberta Award for Poetry Eyes Like Pigeons, Roberta Rees' long poem, comes back, always, to this: "… Thi' in Vietnamese means poetry." Thi, a Vietnamese refugee, is this book’s associational matrix; playing with the possibilities of her name, Rees writes of Thi, poetry both self-reflexive and self-reflective, and immensely different from that which idealizes women with cliches like the title of this volume. The poetry she finds through Thi is as harsh as it is beautiful; its content as sorrowful as the style is liberating, joyful.
False Spring: Poems
by Darren BiffordPoems about commitment and catastrophe, / from a voice of intense lyrical skepticism and wonderful tonal mobility.
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.
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.
The Fetch
by Nico RogersShortlisted for the 2011 Northern "LIT" Award (Northern Libraries recognizing Northern Authors) A book of voices arising out of the lives of people who populated outport Newfoundland. Drawing on family recollections, interviews with elders and extensive research in archives and regional museums, The Fetch, Nico Rogers' first book, is a brilliant hybrid -- neither a novel nor a collection of short stories. This compelling volume of tales and prose poems contains a broad range of characters. There is the slow-witted girl who has lost her mother and now has only the cow named Fatty for a friend; the hard-bitten captain of a schooner in recoil from the ways of his alcoholic father; the child born premature, swaddled in olive oil-soaked linen, placed in a pan and incubated in an oven. And so on, twenty-eight vignettes in all, all tightly written and highly evocative of outport Newfoundland before Confederation. Funny, tragic, and just.
Fetishes of the Floating World
by Don DomanskiGovernor General's Award–winning poet Don Domanski's posthumous last collection once again melds perception-expanding environmental poetry and metaphysics into a seamless, moving lyric whole. Fetishes of the Floating World continues Don's lifelong exploration of mystical ecology. It is an invitation to experience the sacred dimensions of what-is and to become more intimate with the strangeness that haunts our lively, changeable world. Here is a spirituality that doesn't turn its back on the material and immerses us in earthly being. The sustained apprehension of deep time underlies every moment of this work; every moment is held up against that more-than-human span and is relinquished to it. Domanski's full-bodied, incantatory language will penetrate your very marrow, calling you out of yourself to testify to the world's "inclement graces." "Domanski’s poems are intimate, but intimate on a grand scale. As far as I am concerned, there is no better poet writing in English."–Mark Strand on All Our Wonder Unavenged
Field Guide to the Lost Flower of Crete (Hugh MacLennan Poetry Series #58)
by Eleonore SchönmaierThyme clings, high / and away from the grazing and scents / the air.Island reality is interconnected with live-retrieved memories in which a nurse follows a violent patient into the northern Canadian bush, a migrant mother faces her new job as the village butcher, an Ojibway man is forced to walk a dangerous route home alone, teenagers loot the local dump to build their mother's wheelchair, and an electrician watches a woman play a grand piano on a ballfield.A (re)creation of the surreality and altered time within deep states of grieving, Field Guide to the Lost Flower of Crete juxtaposes sorrow with fragmentary unapologetic joy. Eleonore Schönmaier forges compelling symphonic resonances between European musical encounters and a northern working-class childhood. By centring her experiential empathy on a history of racism and poverty, she guides us into better ways of being. Intimate reflections are contrasted with geopolitical and environmental concerns as Schönmaier's fierce intelligence focuses on what is most essential in our lives.The arc of this collection offers a rejuvenating meditation on the meaning of loss and love, highlighted by the lyric beauty of the writing.
First
by Arleen ParéGovernor General’s Award–winning poet Arleen Paré combines the story of two first best friends with questions of the mystery of cosmic first cause. The poems in First, Arleen Paré’s seventh collection, search for a long-lost first friend. They conjure the subtle layers of meaning in that early friendship to riff on to a search for how we might possibly understand the primal First: the beginnings of the cosmos that contains our own particular lives, beginnings and longings. This layered evocation of the past—of childhood in 1950s Dorval, “a green mesh of girls friendships and fights”—and the intensity of the desire to know, give First its haunting beauty. “[T]he word though old fashioned,” Paré writes, “is whence . . . unconditioned origins” when “no worthy question is ever answered on the same plane that it was asked; how to frame the question not knowing the plane on which I must ask it.” “Arleen Paré’s First is an intriguing Gertrude Stein as Nancy Drew mystery. Using prose poem narrative and an intense syntactic poetics, Paré discovers the cracks in memory as she documents the search for her first best friend. The cracks in this lyrical puzzle are heightened by a very active and assertive poetic language that compels as it decodes the investigation of childhood memory and desire. The writing in First demonstrates a powerful juxtaposition of the continuous present with the continuous past.” —Fred Wah “This brilliant collection revolves around firsts, especially a first friend, ‘the impress of her never gone.’ So too with these poems—tough, sweet and poignant, so surely rendered and musically rich—the impress of these poems never gone.” —Lorna Crozier
The Fleece Era
by Joanna LilleyThe Fleece Era is Yukon-based, UK-born Joanna Lilley's first book of poems: a wry and eloquent testament to the intricacies of our various relationships. From the shattered pieces of our environmental puzzles to the labyrinth of family dynamics, Lilley makes these dilemmas come alive. Chillingly sparse, attractively odd and refreshingly frank, The Fleece Era embraces the complexities of human life with an unsettling mix of the sardonic and the compassionate.