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Enlarge Cover
list price: $16.95
edition:Paperback
category: Poetry
published: Oct 2011
ISBN:9780889226708
publisher:
Talonbooks
Description
Sachiko Murakami approaches the urban centre through its inhabitants' greatest passion: real estate. Rebuild engraves itself on the absence of Vancouver's centre, with its cranes, excavation sites, and bulldozed public spaces. Its poems crumble as the page turns, words flaking from the line like rain-damaged stucco off a leaky condominium, exposing the absence life inside the "stanza" of a despised "Vancouver Special."
About the Author
Sachiko Murakami is the author of four poetry collections, including The Invisibility Exhibit (shortlisted for the Governor General's Literary Award) and her latest, Render. As a literary worker, she has edited poetry, worked for trade organizations, hosted reading series, organized conferences, sat on juries, and judged prizes. She lives in Toronto.
Contributor Notes
Sachiko Murakami's first poetry collection, The Invisibility Exhibit, was a finalist for the Governer-General's Award for Poetry and the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. She has been a literary worker for various publishers, magazines, and organizations, and is a past member of Vancouver's Kootenay School of Writing collective. She lives in Toronto where she co-hosts the Pivot Reading Series.
Editorial Reviews
“a unique and thoughtfully crafted book”
—The Fiddlehead
“Murakami has quickly demonstrated a remarkable range and ambition.”
—EVENT
“These are angry poems. Proud and angry. But smart and quirky, too, daring us to tear up our death pledge to real estate, and rethink our citizenship in scandalous cities. They ask hard questions about democracy, Olympic extravaganzas, police battalions and single feet that wash up on the beach. What is home in a state where the cost of a house would feed whole villages for years? […] Murakami brings us home to our senses.”
—Meredith Quartermain
“‘Did this happen, here? Did this/ really happen to me?’ Such a devastated hole gapes in narrative before a moment of potent reconfiguration, and it’s quite genius of Sachiko Murakami’s new collection, Rebuild, to pose a doubled speaker of agape grief: both the narrator who has lost a father in troubling circumstances, and the contemporary development-manic city itself, specifically glass-pocked Vancouver, lamenting its gutted and guttered wholeness (acknowledging that wholeness is a myth, yet another hole).”
—Margaret Christakos
“The poems in Rebuild strike at (the crack in) the heart of Vancouver. […] Murakami’s poetry performs erasure on itself, tries to renovate and rebuild. Something faster. Something better. Tears out consonant and vowel, post and beam, with dishwasher, writes elegy, writes condo, writes missing, writes return. Returns to scaffolding, to consonant, to the letters of her dead father’s name.”
—Nikki Reimer
“a unique and thoughtfully crafted book. … Surprisingly, these poems do not feel particularly rich in images or metaphor, but they are bold, political, and engaging. … The poems seem to expand and contract, looking up and around at the structures (both material and immaterial), and subsequently looking inward … It’s clear the poet trusts her readers to settle in, to stop reading, or to renovate, of our own choosing.”
—The Fiddlehead
