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Jill Battson's highly anticipated new collection of poems, The Ecstatic Torture of Gratitude, pushes deep into the heart of the human condition. In lush and visceral language Jill explores loss, beauty, nature, Francis Bacon's ordered hoarding and the meaning of Martha Stewart. Jill's poems whisper like muted Miles Davis tunes melancholy in the ear, or shout their colours from the top of desert mesas. Many of the poems in this collection are a result of collaborative artist process with dancers, composers, singers and painters, but above all they will live in your memory like a perfect pearl long after their first reading.
When Arc began publishing in 1978, it had one aim: to publish the best work by Canada's new and established poets. Celebrating Arc's first two decades, We All Begin in a Little Magazine testifies to how fully the editors realized their aspirations. It provides a rich cross section of Canada's poetry of the time, the most vital years thus far in the history of Canadian Literature. Read the work of your favourite poets just as they first made names for themselves. Rediscover the excitment you felt when you came across their poems in Arc Canada's best "little magazine."
Jill Battson, whose first book of poems, Hard Candy, shook the poetry establishment by its well-starched neck, is back with a second breathtaking collection of lyric and elegiac poems. These are poems that are not afraid to name real people and real places, poems that revel in the relationships that make our lives, in the end, worth living. Ashes Are Bone and Dust maps the way through grief and recovery. The poems OCo sensual, disturbing and probing OCo document Battson's parents' death and the aftermath that loss leaves behind. They also address the process of recovery, pulling heavily on the journey for discovery both tangible and emotional."
Listening Up, Writing Down, and Looking Beyond is an interdisciplinary collection that gathers the work of scholars and performance practitioners who together explore questions about the oral, written, and visual. The book includes the voices of oral performance practitioners, while the scholarship of many of the academic contributors is informed by their participation in oral storytelling, whether as poets, singers, or visual artists. Its contributions address the politics and ethics of the utterance and text: textualizing orature and orality, simulations of the oral, the poetics of performance, and reconstructions of the oral.
The Pigheaded Soul presents a series of witty, intelligent, and sometimes controversial essays in which talented newcomers and avowed masters alike find themselves within the literary crosshairs of acclaimed poet and critic Jason Guriel. Guriel does not shy away from the negative review, nor does he begrudge praise where praise is due. He applauds the innovative and evocative, rails against the lazy and the imprecise, and critiques the ‘hipster’ mentality of so-called avant-gardists who use the same tired tricks as shortcuts to perceived innovation. But far from providing only reviews and critical readings, The Pigheaded Soul serves up amusing insider anecdotes about the poetry community, from intelligent examinations of inspiration and imagination, to gonzo reportage of high-profile – and occasionally absurd – literary events. Wry, engaging, and astute, Guriel writes with a confidence and panache that enlivens the often dry and dusty field of literary criticism.
A story of incestuous love and biting satire on Catholicism.
This anthology takes a unique approach to the process of poetry. Each poem included in the book is followed by at least one earlier draft or version of that poem. The reader is thus able to explore the development of the poet’s vision and to make a variety of historical, aesthetic, and intellectual comparisons. The poets represented have been chosen both on the basis of the aesthetic strength of their work and on the grounds of the availability of previous versions of their work. The inclusion of a number of selections by poets ranging from Dickinson and Yeats to Larkin, Plath, and P.K. Page allows readers to focus in some depth on the work of these poets. Though the anthology makes no claim to present a selection fully representative of different eras, regions, or poetic styles, the inclusion of a miscellany as a final chapter adds a substantial measure of breadth to the anthology. Each chapter includes brief commentary by the editors, and questions follow each set of poems.
Psychic Unrest is full of the sea and rain, blues and golds, rhythm and revolution. This is Lillian Allen's long-anticipated book of poems OCo her first book since 1993. Collected here is a mix of poems, songs and poetic essays. Allen creates and examines a new poetic style, blending traditional poetry with her inimitable lyrical style, resulting in abstract poems with rhythmic movement that shout out to be read aloud."
A Ruckus of Awkward Stacking is about memory OCo memory as a poetic form through which refractions of loss, recovery, discovery and identity form an imaginative reshaping of the past. In raw brushstrokes, Robinson records the slow cascade of events and characters slipping through the thin membrane of experience, shaping our histories. At the same time, he experiments with style and form in a wonderfully sinuous writing. With this, his first book, Robinson makes a staggering debut on the North American literary stage."