All Books

In Greek mythology the muses preside over the arts and inspire writers and artists to produce works of genius. In ‘Frenzy’, Catherine Owen pays homage to the muses in a six-part compilation of muse-quests, some the author’s, some those of others. In “Flood-Ghazals,” she takes the leaping form of the Persian ghazal and makes it fluid, out of entirely, loosened from its couplet bounds and set free as an unravelled block of threads. “Cobalt Moments” are paeans to a place and its temporalinhabitants-a punk-metal bar in Vancouver and some of its crazy denizens, an attempt to capture the rhythms of this hypnotizing zone of intense music and liminal people. “Opposite Angel’s” is a satirical fable of the muse-seeker. How the artist, perhaps unwittingly, ends up placing their muses, especially when they are human, alive, and of the desired gender, on a pedestal. “One Week in Her Life” covers eight random days, in which the poet rambles through the urban world, facing various incongruities, griefs, absurdities, while reveling in little glimpses of peace. “agitate” is a long poem about a photographer’s sojourn along a Vancouver Island beach on a trek to chronicle sea surfaces. Environmental, gendered, and artistic critique collide in her mental and physical reality as she dreams of emerging from the frenzy to establish one pure moment of beauty in the world.

“Catherine Owen is a neo-romantic bard whose idiosyncratic poetry is barbed with aspects of Tough Love wed to the groom of nihilism. This poet wears a black mood for a wedding dress as she casts invective against bourgeois normalcy. Mistress of neologism and its conflicted ally-ambiguity?-this musifier is unabashedly shameless in making herself “lovesick”. A poet taster’s head spins, which may not be a bad thing. In an era of political correctness and its self-righteous terrorisms, Owen’s muse skateboards over society’s niceties as her love junkie heart leaps like an adolescent butterfly. Revel in the nuancesof light and darkness doing a tango in the ineffable quest for the muse’s many forms.” – Joe Rosenblatt (poet, artist, editor, and recipient of the Governor General’s Literary Award)

“Catherine Owen is an extraordinarily gifted poet. It’s not just the sheer sonic pleasure of her language or the largesse of her endlessly inventive imagery but that she is unsettled and unsettling, deeply disobedient and yet almost selfless in her surrender to form. These poems, and especially the Flood-Ghazals, take you down and then drag you up again, gasping for air.” -Robert Priest (poet, songwriter, playwright, winner of the Milton Acorn Memorial People’s Poetry Award)

Act I of LaFrance’s first book, Species Branding, ends with the line: “crippled on my last leg. where are our friends?” It is a question that led to Friendly + Fire (Talonbooks 2016), where LaFrance takes aim at friendship as such.

The Tarnak Farm Incident, where four Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan were killed by American Air Force pilot Harry Schmidt, is used as source material to navigate and build a discourse of friendship in the 21st century. From this case study, Friendly + Fire interrogates the male subjective experience of war and the gendered implications of camaraderie or “brotherhood” by employing a character named H.S. (his? Harry Schmidt?) on the cheap as a filter for engaging with and through real-life stories of friendly fire.

Friendly + Fire commingles receiving a “pink slip” from an employer with forced affect in the workplace. Work, of course, is another social site where friends are made and ultimately collapse outside the parameters of wage labour. Here is where friends can become comrades.

In Friendly + Fire the mental and physical conditions endured by fighter pilots (suppressed appetite, prescribed sedatives and amphetamines to regulate sleep and stress tolerance) parallel the semiotic and parasitic flows of online friends. The inaccuracy of a war target, of friendly fire, hovers and takes aim at the frivolities of gossip quasi far away from any war zone: “MILITARY LINGO SUBLIMATES SMACK TALK FROM HERE ON IN.”
~~ Danielle

In the title poem of this extraordinary first book, Sally Ito remembers her childhood in Alberta, when she set frogs in the rain barrel and watched them swim like stars in a “pool of still and nether depths/ whose mirrored surface was all.”Those imagined depths become a powerful metaphor in these poems, which reflect Ito’s experiences as a young Japanese Canadian living and writing in Alberta, the Northwest Territories, the West Coast and Japan. Hers is a distinct poetic voice, equally at ease with such diverse images as an aged Chinese man on the train, the Inuit goddess of the sea and the first crocus of spring. Frogs in the Rain Barrel was runner-up for the Milton Acorn People’s Poetry Award in 1996.