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"Most long poems contain lyric occasions. Here is an amazingly sustained lyric that contains traces of other commodities." -Robert Kroetsch Sheila Murphy and Douglas Barbour extend their singular poetic vision of that elusive third I/eye in Continuations 2. The new lyric voice sustained (within) these labyrinthine verses does so by virtue of its authors' pitch-perfect collaborative process. For ten years they have kept their song alive via email,...
2) Dear Hermes
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By turns joyous and adventurous, melancholy and nostalgic, Michelle Smith's debut collection of poems showcases a wide-ranging fascination with places, people, and story. Smith's limpid and humane handling of an array of themes, emotions, and styles-her Norwegian ancestry, her Canadian Prairie heritage, the significance of family, the fragility of memory, world travel, ekphrasis, myth, and more-exemplifies the lyric self on a poetic grand tour, or...
3) Wells
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Jenna Butler draws on her own experiences of her grandmother's disappearance into senile dementia to reassemble a sensual world in longpoem form that positively crackles with imagery and rhythm. Identities and memories flow and flicker as she strings together fragments of narrative into stories that comprise one woman's life. It entwines her disappearing life with that of the persona of the woman's granddaughter through a choreographed confusion of...
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"I wanted this to be a narrative. So finally Jean-Luc went all the way: every line in the script a quotation from somewhere else. Every blessed line. Love doesn't die. It's people who die. Love just goes away." -from "NOUVELLE VAGUE / New Wave (1990)" Stephen Scobie celebrates "the greatest film director of his age" with poetry exploring 44 of Godard's films. Subtle yet profound unities play from poem to poem. Characters, locations, images, and the...
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you can't stop it. everyone's expendable, James. everyone's replaceable. even you. especially you. In a penetrating, violent, sexy, and often hilarious apocalypse, a world-famous superspy meets his demise at the hands of an audacious, painstaking poet. Kimmy Beach fuses popular culture and narrative poetry to astonishing effect in this, her fifth book. Feasting on the tropes, traps, and types of the James Bond mythos and doubling back on the incendiary...
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"We're not exactly scene-stealers, so you don't hear much from us shy folk-and that's usually how we like it." -Elizabeth Zotova, "My Dear X" The pages of this anthology are filled with personal essays and poems of thoughtful musings, raw memories, and humorous self-examinations by authors and poets who have been labelled by the world-teachers, parents, and peers-as shy. Here, they proudly own up to their shyness, and their message is clear: they...
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The pages of this anthology are filled with personal essays and poems of thoughtful musings, raw memories, and humorous self-examinations by authors and poets who have been labelled by the world-teachers, parents, and peers-as shy. Here, they proudly own up to their shyness, and their message is clear: they don't need to be "cured"! Why should they, when nearly half of North Americans consider themselves shy? Editors Naomi K. Lewis and Rona Altrows...
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Through mesmerizing forays into characterization, voicing, and narrative technique, and with a clean economy of style rare even in short fiction, Astrid Blodgett conjures the moral and existential freight of her fully fledged characters in the throes of realistic moments. From the fascinatingly unhinged hero of "Getting the Cat," to the dreamy survey of prairie landscape and childhood experience of "New Summer Dresses," to the fatal irony of "Ice...
9) As If
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as if there could be no other memory a tree invisible remembering itself In as if, E.D. Blodgett takes readers on journeys of contemplation in which he re-imagines the lyric form. Each line leaves the reader breathless as it runs into the next to form a continuous cycle, a continued breath. The delicate syntax of each piece pushes one forward, ever forward. The poems are Dantesque, leading the traveller through a deeper, darker world. As a collection,...
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"Freedom is something my father has never known. How do I explain freedom to the ones born bent?" -from "Not Scared" Ella Zeltserman's poetry cuts both ways. The story of her flight from the USSR in 1979-of the young family she brought to Edmonton and the older one she left behind-does "explain freedom to the ones born bent," but it also explains oppression to the ones born free. Deftly modulating language, imagery, and events of past and present,...
11) Standard candles
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Like the ever-widening universe, Standard candles expands on Alice Major's earlier themes of family, mythology, and cosmology, teasing out subtle wonders in form and subject. Her voice resonates through experiments with old and new poetic forms as she imbues observed and imagined phenomena-from the centres of galaxies to the mysteries of her own backyard-with the most grounded and grounding moments of human experience. In Standard candles, readers...
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"It's a losing battle:
my words have no chance against time.
Sometimes,
unable to catch up with imagination,
I leave the battle, candle in hand,
in complete darkness."
- from "Trying Again to Stop Time"
Jalal Barzanji chronicles the path of exile and estrangement from his beloved native Kurdistan to his chosen home in Canada. His poems speak of the tension that exists between the place of one's birth and an adoptive land, of that delicate dance...
13) A Year of Days
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"As soon as she was gone from this earth, I felt an overwhelming need for more of her. I had to find her again. But how do you find someone after they're gone for good?"
After her mother succumbed to a rare form of dementia, Myrl Coulter turned the eulogy she had written for the funeral into a series of meditations on absence. The result is fifteen personal narrative essays that move through the vacations, holidays, special occasions, and ordinary...
14) 100 Days
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100 days... 100 days that should not have been... 100 days the world could have stopped. But did not.
For 100 days, Juliane Okot Bitek recorded the lingering nightmare of the Rwandan genocide in a poem-each poem recalling the senseless loss of life and of innocence. Okot Bitek draws on her own family's experience of displacement under the regime of Idi Amin, pulling in fragments of the poetic traditions she encounters along the way: the Ugandan...
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Gisèle Villeneuve's short stories test the elastic pull between passion and terror. For inspiration, Villeneuve turned to her personal history to examine what lures urban dwellers outdoors, to test themselves against peaks and valleys. Using the overarching metaphor of mountain climbing, she plays with form, language, and narrative to reveal our fears, our loves, our passions. Rising Abruptly is a perfect companion for anyone who likes to travel,...
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Ten years, ten authors, ten critics. The Canadian Literature Centre/Centre de littérature canadienne reaches into its ten-year archive of Brown Bag Lunch readings to sample some of the most diverse and powerful voices in contemporary Canadian literature. This anthology offers readers samples from some of Canada's most exciting writers of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Each selection is introduced by a brief essay, serving as a point of entry into...
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"Eskimo, now that's a word. White word. White word for white people to wrap around their pink tongues. Esquimaux. Spell it any way you want and it still comes out the same, skid row and all. - from "Kabloona Red" In Annie Muktuk and Other Stories, Norma Dunning portrays the unvarnished realities of northern life through gritty characters who find themselves in difficult situations. Dunning grew up in a silenced form of Aboriginality, experiencing...
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Lisa Martin's new poetry collection seeks the kind of lyric truth that lives in paradox, in the dwelling together of seeming opposites such as life and death, love and loss, faith and doubt, joy and sorrow. Here readers will find a range of moods, tones, and subjects, as well as both traditional and contemporary forms-from sonnets to prose poems. This is a collection imbued with the light of an enduring, if troubled, faith. With its focus on spirit,...
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Secrets aren't good for families. - from "Big Luck Island"
In The Left-Handed Dinner Party and Other Stories-a collection of new, delightful, distinctive short stories-everyone is missing something or someone; every family is riven by secrets and absences. From "The Remedy," a tale of revenge and justice, to "The Smart Sisters," a story of tricky family dynamics, Coulter's narratives portray relationships, loss, and what we learn in the aftermath...
20) Listen. if
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first snow falling slow
hangs in the air
a curtain drifting there
thickening sight
-"Winter"
In this new collection, Douglas Barbour experiments with what he calls "rhythmically intense open form." Listen. If presents technically innovative poetry that invites the reader to join in some serious play. Barbour's vivid, ekphrastic poems engage an ongoing conversation among artworks-not only classic paintings but also popular music-while his lyric poems...



