Descartes asked, How can I know that I am not now dreaming? The Certainty Dream poses similar questions through poetry, but without the trappings of traditional philosophy. Kate Hall’s bracingly immediate, insistently idiosyncratic debut collection lays bare the tricks and tools of her trade: a mynah bird perches in poems but 'stands for nightingale'; the poet’s antelope turns transparent; she dresses up her orange ...
Joyfully melding knowing humour and torqued-up wordplay, Holbrook’s second collection is a comic fusion of the experimental and the experiential, the procedural and the lyric. Punch lines become sucker punches, line breaks slip into breakdowns, the serious plays comical and the comical turns deadly serious. Holbrook’s poems don’t use humour as much as they deconstruct the comic impulse, exposing its roots in the pol ...
Originally twelve years in the making! Featuring a cast of thousands. It still stars the letter H, and introduces Probable Systems, Negatives, and the Actual Life of Language! Your heart will pound as you see H's turn into I's before your very own eyes. You'll thrill as words fall apart only to create other words. You'll gasp as bpNichol collaborates with the dead. You'll shake your head in disbelief as he walks the line ...
Touch to Affliction is a text of ruins: ruins of genre, of language, of the city, of the body, of the barbarism of the twentieth century. At once lament, accusation and elegy, this work articulates the crumbling of buildings, the evisceration of language, the inhumanity that arises from patrie. Acclaimed poet Nathalie Stephens walks among these ruins, calling out to those before her who have contemplated atrocity: Martin Buber, Henryk G ...
Implicating extremes from Coriolanus to Karen Carpenter, David McGimpsey’s Sitcom is both serious poetry and a work of comedy. Where Timon of Athens meets Shania Twain, that's where you'll find Sitcom. Mischievous, generous and side-splittingly funny, this collection of wry soliloquies and sonnets begins with a milestone birthday and finds itself in demi-mondes as varied as the offices of university regents and the basic plo ...
The Refrigerator Memory is an exuberant, strangely funny celebration of sadness. With fable-like miniature stories and short lyric poems, Shannon Bramer creates a world littered with stolen pears and prosthetic arms and inhabited by Kindness scientists and hot-air-balloon operators. The poems invoke a world of childhood delights and demons in the context of grown-up fears and appetites: heartbreak, loss, jealousy and old-fashioned sibling rival ...
The heat of summer on an earlobe, a parking meter, the shadow of crabs and pigeons under a cherry tree, an olive, a shoulder blade – in the poems of Nicole Brossard these concrete, quotidian things move languorously through the senses to find a place beyond language. Taken together, they create an audacious new architecture of meaning. Nicole Brossard, one of the world’s foremost literary innovators, is known for her experime ...
'All of Nichol's work is stamped by his desire to create texts that are engaging in themselves as well as in context, and to use indirect structural and textual devices to carry meaning. In The Martyrology different ways of speaking testify to a journey through different ways of being. Language is both the poet’s instructor and, through its various permutations, the dominant 'image' of the poem. The [nine] books of ...
'All of Nichol's work is stamped by his desire to create texts that are engaging in themselves as well as in context, and to use indirect structural and textual devices to carry meaning. In The Martyrology different ways of speaking testify to a journey through different ways of being. Language is both the poet’s instructor and, through its various permutations, the dominant 'image' of the poem. The [nine] books of ...
