You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
A musical celebration of the garden, from chaff to grass, and all of its lowly weeds, herbs, and creatures Sylvia Legris’s Garden Physic is a paean to the pleasures and delights of one of the world’s most cherished pastimes: Gardening! “At the center of the garden the heart,” she writes, “Red as any rose. Pulsing / balloon vine. Love in a puff.” As if composed out of a botanical glossolalia of her own invention, Legris’s poems map the garden as body and the body as garden—her words at home in the phytological and anatomical—like birds in a nest. From an imagined love-letter exchange on plants between garden designer Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson to a painting by Agnes Martin to the medicinal discourse of the first-century Greek pharmacologist Pedanius Dioscorides, Garden Physic engages with the anaphrodisiacs of language with a compressed vitality reminiscent of Louis Zukofsky’s “80 Flowers.” In muskeg and yard, her study of nature bursts forth with rainworm, whorl of horsetail, and fern radiation—spring beauty in the lines, a healing potion in verse.
From the winner of the Griffin Prize, a richly lyrical collection of poems exploring the body's minutiae
Winner of the 2006 Griffin Poetry Prize Sonic congestion. Purgatorial traffic jam: corkscrewing countercochlearwise the only way out. Nerve Squall is a field guide like no other, a surreal handbook to a landscape at the crossroads of meteorology and neurology, where the electrical storms without and the electrical impulses within converge. Legris's fascination with weather, ghosts and brain disorders is the starting point for a collection of poetry that ensures you'll never look at nature the same way again. You'll find snow golems and ghost cats, and a sky filled with fish swimming the winds of a storm. And you'll find a haunted terrain where the natural world becomes an allegory for our mo...
Part of our revived Poetry Pamphlets series, Pneumatic Antiphonal is a fun, humming, bio-physiological word-whizzing flight into birdsong penned by young Canadian poet, Sylvia Legris -- her first publication in the U.S. An excerpt: The theory of corpuscular flight is the cardinal premise of red birds carrying song-particles carrying oxygen. Erythrocytic. Sticky. Five quarts of migration.
During the heatwave of July 2017, Ariel Gordon spent two days sitting on the patio of downtown Winnipegs Tallest Poppy, writing snippets of poems which she hung from the boulevard tree using paper and string. Passersby were invited to TreeTalk too their secrets / one-liners / meditations / haiku were also hung from the tree. By the end of the weekend, the elm had a second temporary canopy of leaves: 234 poems, 111 written by Gordon, 107 written by passersby, and 16 from other sources. Gordon has assembled all these voices into a long/found poem that asks: what does it mean to live in the urban forest? What does it mean to be in relationship with each other but also with the more-than-human? The book also includes pen and ink illustrations by Winnipeg artist Natalie Baird. Since 2017, Gordon has also hung poems in trees at the Sage Hill Poetry Experience in Muenster, SK, the Prairie Gate Literary Festival in Morris, MN, and at the Winnipeg Folk Festival as part of the Prairie Outdoor Exhibition. Stay tuned for more TreeTalk-ing!
None
A lyrical guide through Saskatchewan’s Aspen Parkland by a poet whose work is “fizzing with ecological intellect” (Times Literary Supplement). Self-seeding wind is a wind of ever-replenishing breath. —from “The Walk, or The Principle of Rapid Peering” The title of Sylvia Legris’ melopoeic collection The Principle of Rapid Peering comes from a phrase the nineteenth-century ornithologist and field biologist Joseph Grinnell used to describe the feeding behavior of certain birds. Rather than waiting passively for food to approach them, these birds live in a continuous mode of “rapid peering.” Legris explores this rich theme of active observation through a spray of poems that to...
In this extraordinary, semi-autobiographical novel, Penelope Mortimer depicts a married woman's breakdown in 1960s London. With three husbands in her past, one in her present and a numberless army of children, Mrs Mortimer is astonished to find herself collapsing one day in Harrods. This strange, unsettling novel, shot through with black comedy, is a moving account of one woman's realisation that marriage and family life may not, after all, offer all the answers to the problems of living. 'Beautiful ... almost every woman I can think of will want to read this book' Edna O'Brien
The first four collections in our revitalized Poetry Pamphlet series, established to highlight original work from writers around the world as well as forgotten treasures lost in the cracks of literary history. Included are: Two American Scenes: Our Village & A Journey on the Colorado River, by Lydia Davis and Eliot Weinberger; Sorting Facts, or Nineteen Ways of Looking at Chris Marker, by Susan Howe; The Helens of Troy, New York, by Bernadette Mayer; and Pneumatic Antiphonal, by Sylvia Legris.
‘Fiercely intelligent, very funny and unlike anything else I’ve ever read’ MARK HADDON 'Original...witty...playful...a wonderfully funny book' JAMES WOOD 'A triumph – a genuinely new story, a genuinely new form' A. S. BYATT Eleven-year-old Ludo is in search of a father. Raised singlehandedly by his mother Sibylla, Ludo’s been reading Greek, Arabic, Japanese and a little Hebrew since the age of four; but reading Homer in the original whilst riding the Circle Line on the London Underground isn’t enough to satisfy the boy’s boundless curiosity. Is he a genius? A real-life child prodigy? He’s grown up watching Seven Samurai on a hypnotising loop – his mother’s strategy to give him not one but seven male role models. And yet Ludo remains obsessed with the one thing his mother refuses to tell him: his real father’s name. Let loose on London, Ludo sets out on a secret quest to find the last samurai – the father he never knew.