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Touch to Affliction is a text of ruins: ruins of genre, of language, of the city, of the body, of the barbarism of the twentieth century. At once lament, accusation and elegy, this work articulates the crumbling of buildings, the evisceration of language, the inhumanity that arises from patrie. Acclaimed poet Nathalie Stephens walks among these ruins, calling out to those before her who have contemplated atrocity: Martin Buber, Henryk Górecki, Simone Weil. In the end, this work considers what we are left with – indeed, what is left of us – as both participants in and heirs to the twentieth century. Touch to Affliction is political but never polemical. It lives at the interstices of thought and the unnameable. It is a book for our times.
In a Paper City write nothing down. So commands this text, which dismantles itself as it charts its own admonished course, navigating the interstices between English and French, the author's two mother tongues. Through the disquieting absence of the letters characters n and b, and the narrator's attempt to uncover and record their lives, Stephens confronts and challenges human proscription through the untranslatibility of experience, with ironic and apocalyptic consequences. Beneath this thin narrative runs an undercurrent of horror that decries the deliberate plunder of the City resulting from an absolute disregard for history's relationship to the body's fictions - what n and b term 'art lost to numbers.'
Literary Nonfiction. Literary Criticism. The talks collected in AT ALBERTA have as their ironic coincidence: place. Spatially concurrent, they were all delivered in Edmonton. They deliberately thwart the systematic treatment of genre, translation, desire, and territorialisation through reiterated displacement, subterfuge and irritation. Distrustful of genre delineation, Stephens pursues her work away from the usual generic safeguards, preferring instead the unexpected that arises from the arguably disreputable and misunderstood place where various lines cross. AT ALBERTA persues a new critical position in her delineation. Stephens is the author of a dozen books, including THE SORROW AND THE FAST OF IT, JE NATHANAEL, TOUCH TO AFFLICTION, and PAPER CITY, available from SPD.
When Charles Wilson flees his dead-end life for Trempes, the first thing he finds is the body of his childhood friend, Paul Faber, hanging from a tree in the clearing where they played as boys. Obsessed with uncovering the story behind Faber's death, Wilson learns that truth and time aren't always what they appear to be, and he is soon caught up in a delusory spiral that threatens his very existence. At once a neo-Gothic metaphysical thriller and a meditative fairy tale, The River of Dead Trees charts a dizzying descent into the fragility of faith and of memory.
Hervé, the friend with AIDS; his lover, Hervé, also afflicted; Hervé the hairdresser; Hervé next door who has defenestrated himself: in A Cannibal and Melancholy Mourning the narrator confronts the deaths of so many friends, all named Hervé. But the dead cannot be buried so easily; they live on, spectres haunting her, as the cumulative effect of all her Hervés becomes a multifaced Death that simultaneously angers, saddens, cheers and confuses her. In this unfolding series of encounters between the living and the dead, Mavrikakis draws on Deleuze, Freud, Foucault and novelist Hervé Guibert to make of herself and of this visceral, compelling novel a kind of living mausoleu where those unable to speak may still be heard.
The first graduate conference of the Young Scholars' Network of the Association for Canadian Studies in German-speaking countries took place in Berlin in 2004. The conference has been an integral part of the academic year in Canadian Studies ever since. It offers an opportunity for young scholars to present their B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. projects and receive feedback and helpful suggestions from peers and experts. This type of academic exchange is particularly important in Canadian Studies as they often occupy a marginal position at universities. Beside graduate students from Canada, Germany and Austria, prominent Canadian scholars have also been invited to speak at the conference every year. Th...
People fall in love with their therapists all the time. It's called transference. Troubled is brutally honest and erotically frank, a no-holds-barred confession of a patient/psychiatrist relationship gone horribly wrong. With his signature mix of scathing self-analysis and volatile wordplay, RM Vaughan brazenly documents how an innocent flirtation with his therapist escalated into a dangerous sexual misadventure. When the clandestine relationship goes awry, the consequences are heart-rending and career-ending. Based on circumstances that really happened to Vaughan and ended in legal proceedings and the suspension of the doctor's license, Troubled also includes documents from the investigation and legal cases interspersed amongst the poems. The therapist in question is currently practicing medicine again in British Columbia. 'Troubled is at once a disturbing Elizabeth Smart-like memoir charting the turns and culs-de-sac of an infatuation and an artful literary revenge. It's risky as Baked Alaska. What would it be like if all abused patients were endowed with such talent and courage?' - Don McKay 'A book by RM Vaughan is worth two by, say, most anyone else.' - Eye Weekly
Poetry. Do any of us really speak the same language? BLISSFUL TIMES is a collection of poetry that tries to find out. Beginning with found text from Samuel Beckett's Happy Days, Sandra Alland `translates' the poem 65 times, morphing it into different poetic forms and emotional states, even different media. Using formal constraints, specialty dictionaries, internet search and translation engines, voice-activated software, the weather, global news and personal experiences, Alland invents pieces ranging from lyric poetry to sound poetry, from theatre to rant, from photography to Boggle. Edgy, passionate, amusing and intelligent, BLISSFUL TIMES is a poetic cocktail for our troubled times. Sandra Alland is a writer and multimedia artist who has published and presented her work in Canada, the United States, Mexico, Bermuda, Spain, Scotland and England. Her first full-length book is titled Proof of a Tongue.
This anthology offers refereshing, cogent and insightful explanations of why young poets and writers do what they do. The thirty pieces in side/lines OCo by a unique variety of Canadian writers working in numerous genres OCo reflect on why writers write. Their reflections are not to be held as gospel or lifelong theories, but can be considered writing strategies drawn up at specific points in time, informed by certain unavoidable material conditions, such as current politics and emotions. Ask these writers to explain their craft in ten years, and you may be surprised by their answers."
Trace the diverse networks, influences, dialogues, dialectics, and interventions that make Canada's women writers a powerful force in avant-garde literature.