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Winner of the 2014 Governor General's Literary Award for poetry.
"Arleen Paré turns her cool, benevolent eye to the shared lives of Florence Wyle and Frances Loring, two of Canada's greatest artists, whose sculptures she comes face to face with at the National Gallery of Canada. In the guise of a curator, Paré takes us on a moving, carefully structured tour through the rooms where their work is displayed, the Gallery's walls falling away to travel in time to Chicago (where they met at art school and fell in love in the 1910s), New York, and Toronto (where they lived and worked for the next six decades). Along the way, Paré looks at fashions in art, the politics of gender, and the love that longtime proximity calls forth in us."--
Set in the volatile 1970s and '80s, when social norms and expectations were changing rapidly, Leaving Now is the emotionally candid story of a mother's anguish as she leaves her husband to love a woman. In this second book, Par masterfully blends aspects of her personal journey with her own version of a well-loved fairy tale. Gudrun, the five-hundred-year-old mother of Hansel and Gretel, appears hazily in the narrator's kitchen--presumed dead, all but written out of her own tale, but very much alive. Gudrun spins a yarn of love, loss and leaving, offering comfort and wisdom to the conflicted young mother. Raising children is not for the faint of heart; all parents know the anguish of parting from a child, even if for the briefest moment. Leaving Now is for mothers, fathers, sons and daughters. It is for anyone who has ever lived in a family.
Governor General's Award-winning poet Arleen Paré combines the story of two first best friends with questions of the mystery of cosmic first cause. The poems in First, Arleen Paré's seventh collection, search for a long-lost first friend. They conjure the subtle layers of meaning in that early friendship to riff on to a search for how we might possibly understand the primal First: the beginnings of the cosmos that contains our own particular lives, beginnings and longings. This layered evocation of the past--of childhood in 1950s Dorval, "a green mesh of girls friendships and fights"--and the intensity of the desire to know, give First its haunting beauty. "[T]he word though old fashioned,...
Award-winning poet Arleen Paré pays homage to the work of lesbian Syrian American poet Etel Adnan. If books come from books, as David W. McFadden has claimed, then Time Out of Time is a clear example, arising, very deliberately as it does, out of Etel Adnan's astonishing collection entitled Time. The poems in Time Out of Time are in love with the poems in Adnan's Time and, it seems, Paré has fallen in love with Time's author, Etel Adnan, the internationally renowned poet and painter--or perhaps it is that she has merely fallen in love with Adnan's words. Paré's poems mirror the form, the rhythm, the shape, the short, brief lines in her own spare missives that are the poems in Time. This m...
A Globe and Mail 100 Best Book Finalist, Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction Finalist, City of Victoria Butler Book Prize A deeply affecting portrait of a long partnership and a clear-eyed account of the impact of a serious illness, writing as consolation, and the enduring significance of poetry from one of Canada's most celebrated voices. When we ran off together in 1978, abandoning our marriages and leaving wreckage in our wake, I was a "promising writer," Patrick had just won the Governor General's Award. I was so happy for him, and I've continued to be every time an honour comes his way, but I knew if I didn't grow, if I remained merely someone who showed potential, we woul...
How does a parent cope after the death of a child? Each essay in Always With Me: Parents Talk about the Death of a Child reveals the experiences of parents who have lived through the devastation and upheaval of their child's death. Parents describe the maelstrom they face in their inner landscapes, coping strategies, and realigned place in the world. The writers in this collection of stories take on such topics as shock and isolation, despair, guilt, and how they attempt to make sense of their shattered lives. They offer insights into how their grief and loss are worked through, and why certain personal connections are severed, others strengthened. Importantly, they describe how, with lives altered indelibly, they try to press forward to find a new place in the world.
Donna McCart Sharkey and Arleen Paré , sisters and writers, have co-edited an anthology Don' t Tell: Family Secrets, about what may be hidden in families. For each individual, even in the same family, what is secret and what is not, may be different. In Don' t Tell: Family Secrets, fifty-nine writers tell their stories in either prose or poetry, of their own family secrets. So often, mothers bear the burden, stand over time as the keepers of these secrets, trying to keep families intact. Spanning continents, cultures, wars, belief systems, and the private lives of families, the secrets in this book range from over one hundred years ago to the present and include stories &– some serious, others quirky, some resolved, and still others that remain a mystery.
When Jane Munro’s husband is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, the Griffin-award-winning poet must chart a path through the depths of grief, learning to live with loss and to take solace and find freedom in the restorative powers of writing. Open Every Window is a genre-bending prose account of the unravelling of a life—two lives—when Jane Munro’s husband, Bob, is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Evoking Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, this memoir charts a path through sorrow—the pain of seeing a partner age and approach death, the exhaustion of caretaking, and the regret in seeing life’s scope narrow and diminish. Writing with courage and love, Munro grapples with what it...
Poetry. ALL THE NAMES BETWEEN is Julia McCarthy's third collection. Grounded in the experience of presence in which the external and internal meet, a crossroads of consciousness where "a language without a name / remembers us" and the poem is a votive act, ALL THE NAMES BETWEEN reflects the shadow-light of being, of what is and what isn't, of the seen and the unseen, the forgotten and the remembered; here "every elegy has an ode at its centre / every ode has an elegy around its edges."