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When Fireflies Write Love Letters We Step carefully, for the smallest lights capture us most securely – the fireflies held low by the winds all along the coastal barrens. If we were to trap affection in a shell it would fail to flicker but along this vast cliff-edge we could read love letters by the phosphorescence – if words were equal to the trail of stars, the strewn lights of hard-winged beetles. This collection of linked poems takes us on a journey where angels ride bicycles, wounds both grieve and heal, and "our will / diving through the shuddering / wet world, carries us." Resonant with "a longing so ardent and spacious," these are poems of place and displacement, sickness and hea...
At night we swim / following the fence: / diverted / we enter the net / shaped like a heart / and in the heart the hook / guides us to the back A stunning unfolding of memory, Wavelengths of Your Song juxtaposes a childhood in the northern Canadian wilderness with the adventures of an international creative life. Genuine environmentalism is at the heart of this collection. Migrations of birds and humans lend their songs to the vivid writing and a tangible, sensory reality emerges from their sounds. Music by Beethoven and Rzewski, paintings by Norval Morrisseau and Kandinsky, and writing by Kafka and Celan, inspire Eleonore Schönmaier's poetry. She takes the reader on unexpected journeys skiing across frozen lakes, cycling along Dutch canals, or hiking in Malta and New Zealand. With surprising, at times breathtaking connections, she illuminates hot air ballooning, canoe camping, planting trees on Vienna rooftops, and the bathing of a black horse in the North Sea. In poems that travel extensively around the globe, in lists for living well, and in love letters, Eleonore Schönmaier takes the reader on a journey along the wavelengths of the ocean, sound, and the physics of light.
At times apocalyptic and other times passionate and intimate, Eleonore Schönmaier’s poems show the beauty of the lived and natural world in both wilderness and urban settings. A woman hides her love letters in beehives, a cherry tree in full blossom is transported horizontally on a bike, and three crows tap their beaks on a metal door. A grandmother gestures how birds once flew in blue skies, public smiles are outlawed, and a shot-down jet lands in a field of wildflowers. Men from warm countries wear big coats and are falsely suspected of hiding bombs, an Indigenous man is forced by police into the trunk of a car, and a stork lands in prison under charges of espionage. In Canada, the nort...
Thyme clings, high / and away from the grazing and scents / the air. Island reality is interconnected with live-retrieved memories in which a nurse follows a violent patient into the northern Canadian bush, a migrant mother faces her new job as the village butcher, an Ojibway man is forced to walk a dangerous route home alone, teenagers loot the local dump to build their mother's wheelchair, and an electrician watches a woman play a grand piano on a ballfield. A (re)creation of the surreality and altered time within deep states of grieving, Field Guide to the Lost Flower of Crete juxtaposes sorrow with fragmentary unapologetic joy. Eleonore Schönmaier forges compelling symphonic resonances between European musical encounters and a northern working-class childhood. By centring her experiential empathy on a history of racism and poverty, she guides us into better ways of being. Intimate reflections are contrasted with geopolitical and environmental concerns as Schönmaier's fierce intelligence focuses on what is most essential in our lives. The arc of this collection offers a rejuvenating meditation on the meaning of loss and love, highlighted by the lyric beauty of the writing.
Selected as the 2008 CBC Canada Reads Winner! "A dazzling display of fictional footwork… The author has not written just another hockey novel; he has turned hockey in a metaphor for magic." Maclean's Percival Leary was once the King of the Ice, one of hockey's greatest heroes. Now, in the South Grouse Nursing Home, where he shares a room with Edmund "Blue" Hermann, the antagonistic and alcoholic reporter who once chronicled his career, Leary looks back on his tumultuous life and times: his days at the boys' reformatory when he burned down a house; the four mad monks who first taught him to play hockey; and the time he executed the perfect "St. Louis Whirlygig" to score the winning goal in the 1919 Stanley Cup final. Now all but forgotten, Leary is only a legend in his own mind until a high-powered advertising agency decides to feature him in a series of ginger ale commercials. With his male nurse, his son, and the irrepressible Blue, Leary sets off for Toronto on one last adventure as he revisits the scenes of his glorious life as King of the Ice.
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"Black Writers? African, Bluesy, Classical, Disrespectful, Erudite, Fiery, Groovy, Haunting, Inspiring, Jazzy, Knowing, Liberating, Militant, Nervy, Optimistic, Pugnacious, Quixotic, Rambunctious, Seductive, Truculent, Urgent, Vivacious, Wicked, X-ray sharp, Yearning, Zesty. And so, they matter!" --George Elliott Clarke An anthology of African-Canadian writing, Black Writers Matter offers a cross-section of established writers and newcomers to the literary world who tackle contemporary and pressing issues with beautiful, sometimes raw, prose. As editor Whitney French says in her introduction, Black Writers Matter "injects new meaning into the word diversity [and] harbours a sacredness and an everydayness that offers Black people dignity. " An "invitation to read, share, and tell stories of Black narratives that are close to the bone," this collection feels particular to the Black Canadian experience.
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Penny, an artist, has lived in the same apartment for decades, surrounded by the artifacts and keepsakes of her long life. She is resigned to the mundane rituals of old age, until things start to slip. Before her longtime partner passed away years earlier, provisions were made, unbeknownst to her, for a room in a unique long-term care residence, where Penny finds herself after one too many “incidents.” Initially, surrounded by peers, conversing, eating, sleeping, looking out at the beautiful woods that surround the house, all is well. She even begins to paint again. But as the days start to blur together, Penny – with a growing sense of unrest and distrust – starts to lose her grip o...