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Searing, intimate poems that render a history of trauma, addiction, and recovery through dreams and waking experience.
Why is it often so difficult to stay present in the moment? Poet Sachiko Murakami asked this question in an open call on the Internet, and in airports across the globe, from YVR (Vancouver) to RKV (Reykjavik), people in transit stopped to note in only one sentence their impressions of things, events, people, and feelings. The poems that result from this experiment in crowd-sourcing content search departures and arrivals for a handhold on the fleeting present. Working within and wriggling out of the formal constraint of fourteen lines, Get Me Out of Here explores what poems need to do to stay when the mind is begging to leave. Get Me Out of Here furthers Murakami's investigations into collabo...
Murakami's first book of poetry, written in the political and emotional wake of Vancouver's Missing Women. Governor General's Award Finalist.
Render (v.tr.): to submit, as for consideration; to give or make available; to give what is due or owed; to give in return, or retribution; to surrender; to yield. To represent; to perform an interpretation of; to arrange. To express in another language or form; to translate. To deliver or pronounce formally; to cause to become; to reduce, convert, or melt down, by heating. br> A recovery narrative has a known form: what it was like, what happened, and what it's like today. In a poem, what can be arranged or interpreted with such certainty, by whom, and to what end? What is the relationship of the performance of recovery via a poem to the truth of the experience? Does one deliver the other? ...
In a city ironically famous for its natural setting, the roving subject's gaze naturally turns upward, past the condo towers which frame the protected "view corridors" at the heart of Vancouver's municipally- guaranteed development plan. But look for the city, and one encounters "a kind of standing wave of historical vertigo, where nothing ever stops or grounds one's feet in free-fall." Murakami approaches the urban center through its inhabitants' greatest passion: real estate, where the drive to own is coupled with the practice of tearing down and rebuilding. Like Dubai, where the marina looks remarkably like False Creek, Vancouver has become as much a city of cranes and excavation sites as...
Winner of the 2020 Western Canada Jewish Book Awards, The Lohn Foundation Prize for Poetry In Vancouver for Beginners, the nostalgia of place is dissected through the mapping of a city where readers are led past surrealist development proposals, post-apocalyptic postcards, childhood landmarks long gone and a developer who paces at the city's edge, shoring it up with aquariums. In these poems you will traverse a city lined with rivers, not streets. Memory traps and tourist traps reveal themselves, and the ocean glints, elusive, in the background. Here there are many Vancouvers and no Vancouver, a city meant for elsewhere after the flood has swept through. This place of the living and the dead...
Now that we've sold ourselves to ourselves, shuffling letters and sounds around to hide the pain, how do we represent the uncanny valley in which we've set up shop? In Cursed Objects, Jason Christie recoils in horror at the thoroughness of his self, then begins to write toward a new understanding brokered between all the things that define him and who he thinks he should be and interrogates how we reduce people to words, especially online, turning them into objects.
"Please stay with me, please stay here, please cause poltergeists in my stupid apartment..." Late in the evening of December 13, 2007, Andrea Actis found her father, Jeff, facedown dead in her East Vancouver apartment. So began her passage through grief, self-reckoning, and graduate school in Providence, Rhode Island, where the poetics she studied (and sometimes repudiated) became integral to her gradual reconstruction of wholeness. An assemblage of "evidence" recovered from emails about paranormal encounters sent and received by Jeff (greyallover@yahoo.com), junk mail from false prophets, an annotated excerpt from Laura (Riding) Jackson's "The Serious Angels: A True Story," and transcripts ...
A BBC Radio 2 Book Club Pick 'Ingenious ... touching, surprising and sometimes heartbreaking.' Guardian 'If you're itching to read a new novel by David Mitchell ... try this.' The Times _______________ In Tokyo - one of the world's largest megacities - a stray cat is wending her way through the back alleys. And, with each detour, she brushes up against the seemingly disparate lives of the city-dwellers, connecting them in unexpected ways. But the city is changing. As it does, it pushes her to the margins where she chances upon a series of apparent strangers - from a homeless man squatting in an abandoned hotel, to a shut-in hermit afraid to leave his house, to a convenience store worker searching for love. The cat orbits Tokyo's denizens, drawing them ever closer. 'Masterfully weaves together seemingly disparate threads to conjure up a vivid tapestry of Tokyo; its glory, its shame, its characters, and a calico cat.' David Peace, author of THE TOKYO TRILOGY One of the Independent's best debuts
in his debut poetry collection, sam Cheuk attempts to invent a new way of truth-telling. Borrowing disparate ideas and modes ranging from self-censorship and identity performance, lyric poetry and phenomenology, Cheuk reverse-engineers the parlance of postmodernism in search of the primal motivation behind expression, all the while asking the question: is a lie a lie if the liar shows you how he lies?