Studies in Description
Difficult writing has its way of illuminating the part of the world that counts. One such difficult text is Gertrude Stein’s highly experimental Tender Buttons: objects, food, rooms – long considered the single most groundbreaking literary work of twentieth-century art, literary criticism, and art history. One hundred years since publication, C …
Phyllis Webb and the Common Good
Phyllis Webb is a poet around whom archetypes tend to cluster: the reclusive artist; the distraught, borderline suicidal Sapphic woman poet. While on the surface she seems someone supremely disinterested in the public sphere, argues Stephen Collis in this brilliant and revealing new celebration of her work, Webb is no domestic, as a creator or a cr …
Muthologos
Charles Olson’s insistence that the public value of any articulation is inseparable from the particulars of the time and place of its origins resulted in the proprioceptive methodology of his composition—in his speech and his writing, in both poetry and prose. Olson did not “lecture”—he “talked.” His encyclopedic knowledge of the subj …
Pell Mell
Pell Mell, the middle voice, the syntax meeting its astonishments in its forward stride looking backwards, imagining an image nation where the heart is always torn—to pieces possessed by the other(s). A book so sure of itself that Blaser can begin, after the act of said-and-done, a series called Great Companions. Lesser poets might, and have, cal …
Annihilated Time
Reading against the grain of global ideological flows, Derksen demonstrates how borders, identities, national literatures, urban territories, built space and the spaces of culture and politics have not simply been eroded by globalization, but how the traditional identity-determined scales of culture are being re-imagined as contested spaces for dy …
th last photo uv th human soul
bissett has remained on a permanent world tour for more than thirty years, writing this book while on a European reading circuit that included performances in London, Manchester, Cardiff, Dublin, Paris, Mainz, Trier and Berlin.
In the Midst
For over 40 years Warren Tallman, reader, critic, mentor, friend, confidant, host and impresario to writers all across North America has remained “in the midst” of the poetic discourse that time and again restores the body of his great goddess, Mother Tongue. He has been almost single handedly responsible for introducing the work of Canadian p …
inkorrect thots
WARNING each wun uv thees pomes may contain inkorrect thots these pomes have not bin kleerd by th ministree uv korrect thots
Ths book contains reel storees that have reelee happend th mysteree uv pain has not bin adequatelee xplaind 2 us why memorees can cum crashing down on us robbing us uv our present or why we lifting grasp hold of a suddn laff …
A Record of Writing
Canada’s first poet laureate George Bowering is one of the best known writers and literary personalities in the nation. Poet, novelist, essayist, historian, critic and teacher, he is a prolific, irrepressible writer whose works have been published and produced in an extraordinary variety of forms. A Record of Writing traces the development of Bo …
Tracing the Paths
bpNichol’s The Martyrology is one of the most outrageous, challenging, intriguing and accomplished long poems written in Canada. No other poem of its length has raised the major concerns of our time with such urgency and brilliance. Initially recognized by only a few, this luminous continuing work has attracted more and more readers with the appe …