Like the rhapsodists, the storytellers of ancient Greece, A Pretty Sight shapes voices of the past and present into a stitched song lifted and sounded toward the next century. Haunted by «time's frame / that dark shape near the edge of the canvass,» O’Meara's new book explores aspects of culture, art, war, rebellion and technology, offering defiance amid decay. ...
These poems pause for the spectacle: cloning technologies, super-slo-mo photography, narcotic cab rides. Making fun of consciousness, they describe a system of tripwires, pitfalls, and decoys that this notion of daily viewership entails. These peoms are paeans to our facility for duplicity and self-deception, in which the act of living becomes more and more like a movie we're not in. ...
Need Machine clamors through the brain like an unruly marching band. Both caustic and thoughtful, these poems offer a topography of modern life writ large in twitchy, neon splendor, in a voice as sure as a surgeon and as trustworthy as a rumor. Honest, irreverent, and sharply indifferent, this book will «hogtie you with awe.» ...
"White Piano holds an acute sense of what poetry is, its danger. . . . Brossard knows well that 'life is only good for living' and that living is incarnated in the material of language, that sounds, those carriers of sense, can propel it in front of the world."—Le Devoir Between the verbs quivering and streaming, White Piano unfolds its variations like musical scores. Pronouns and persons, poetry and prose: White Piano, ...
The poems largely concern Henderson's work in the Alberta oilfields, which should be of growing interest as awareness of where our energy comes from increases.With themes of masculinity, violence and labour in the mix, this book should appeal to people who like their poetry with a good dose of testosterone ...
Winner of the 2013 Aqua Books Lansdowne Prize for Poetry (Manitoba Book Awards) If Lisa Robertson were to collide with David Lynch in a dark alley, the result would be a lot like The Politics of Knives. From shattered narratives to surrealistic fantasies, the poems in The Politics of Knives bridge that gap between the conventional and the experimental, combining the intellectual with the visceral. The complicity of language in violence, and the ...
The book's poetic concerns with philosophy and time will make it a sort of poetic companino for people who enjoy books like Hawkings's A Brief History of Time. ...
Cutting Room both describes and pushes against the anxious hum of the technologically saturated present. Sarah Pinder's poems navigate domestic and «natural» spaces as landscapes charged with possible violence and desire while they scan scenes as an outsider or camera eye to unsettle and fray familiar settings. Using hyper-focus and the long gaze, they draw the eye to the corners and seams of these spaces, slowing us down, shifting our focu ...
A part-time stand-up comedian and songwriter, McGimpsey is widely respected as an excellent, engaging and entertaining performer of his work.The book has a strong American focus, including memorable sequences set in Los Angeles, Nashville and Southwest Texas.From baseball to beer to television, the subjects of these sonnets should have great appeal even to people who don't read poetry. It's terrifically funny.McGimpsey's last book ...