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Taking its title from a phrase in a pop-up ad, Inspecting Nostalgia is R. Kolewe’s second collection of poetry that brings together found text and fragments of various writers’ work with scraps from his own journals.
Kolewe’s concerns with “nostalgia,” derived from the Greek “nostos” (return) and “algos” (pain), forge poems that are charged with an intense yearning for that which has been lost. Heartbreak is tempered with Jacques Derrida’s essay on Immanuel Kant to create almost-sonnets and many tercets, and marginal notes brim with desire and memory to test the limits of the age-old matter of the lyric poem.
These poems have their multiplicity fixed on a certain trait that makes us human: an attachment to the past. By piecing together texts from disparate sources, they capture the kaleidoscopic influence of other voices without incongruity or disorientation. Kolewe perches on the threshold of the lyric and conceptual to allow the melody and jangle of influence to rest within us as we read, only to leave us changed and wanting as we try to catch up to the rhythm of the present.
Inspecting Nostalgia has all the lucent warmth and sting of heartbreak – roses, stars, and decay abound – subdued by a compositional technique that pilfers and forages the analytical and prosaic to create a cohesive
work that is often elegiac and always evocative.
Poised between hope and despair, each man faces how best to move beyond the past and adapt to a future in which cultural legacy seems destined to diminish. Symbolic and politically charged, Inspiration Point speaks about life on a small Maritime reservation and the constant struggle for cultural survival.
Installations, David Solway’s 14th book of poetry, is haunted with transformation, Few poets possess as commanding a gift for metaphor or can use it to masterfully conjure the ever-changing landscape of the natural world. Like the jerry-rigged farmer’s contraption that stands in for “eclectic grandeur and jumbled eloquence,” this collection celebrates the way ordinary elements can be yoked to create wholly original insights. Be it through rhyme or free verse, slang or lyricism, and roaming a dazzling range of tones–satirical, philosophical, scabrous, tender, celebratory–Installations offers up a world depicted and inhabited in all its manifestations.
Instructions for a Flood is a non-fiction account, in the form of personal essays and vignettes, of a life in the central interior and coastal regions of British Columbia. Inspired by her passion for exploration and a desire to reframe her understanding of the areas in which she grew up, Adrienne Fitzpatrick embarks upon a decade of reflection and personal reconciliation within her own community and the broader landscape she inhabits. Though she is accompanied by fellow travellers, workmates and guides on these journeys, Fitzpatrick is drawn to the isolation of these areas and the resilience and community this isolation necessitates. In these encounters, the stories of the people and places meld, connected to the land and to other communities by great bodies of water and remote lakes and streams. Like the water that connects and imprints upon the land, there are glints of light and beauty, as well as deep, dark places of danger to be uncovered here. Instructions for a Flood serves as a cartographic study of the strong pull of nature in places where the past is ever present, inscribing upon the land like a network of arteries and instilling in us a guidebook for being.
In Insure Your Investments Against Losses, “forensic gumshoe” Robert Goldin, who has been featured in Maclean’s, National Post, Vancouver Sun, and many other publications and TV shows, lets investors in on a secret their financial advisers are not telling them: that they can insure their investments so that their capital never falls below what they put into the market. Instead of going on that queasy roller coaster ride called investing in the stock market, investors can: safely invest in individual securities, exchange traded funds, and index funds and then use existing investment strategies such as options and strip bonds to insure their individual investments, or their entire investment portfolio, against losses; break out the champagne when their investments make a profit; and, sleep easy when they don’t, knowing that at worst they will not lose one cent of their hard-earned cash.
Insure Your Investments Against Losses is not just another investment book on asset allocation and retirement planning. It will revolutionize your investment practices. And it will send a strong message to the investment advisors benefiting from these practices themselves but not passing them on to the public.
Domestic homicide is violence that strikes within our most intimate relations. The most common strategy for addressing this kind of transgression relies on policing and prisons. But through examining commonly accepted typologies of high-risk intimate partner violence, Ardath Whynacht shows that policing can be understood as part of the same root problem as the violence it seeks to mend and provides an abolitionist frame for the most dangerous forms of intimate partner violence. This book illustrates that the origins of both the carceral state and toxic masculinity are situated in settler colonialism and racial capitalism and sees police homicide and domestic homicide as akin. Describing an experience of domestic homicide in her community and providing a deeply personal analysis of some of the most recent cases of homicide in Canada, the author inhabits the complexity of seeking abolitionist justice. Insurgent Love traces the major risk factors for domestic homicide within the structures of racial capitalism and suggests transformative, anti-capitalist, anti-racist, feminist approaches for safety, prevention and justice.
One night in April, after a Sunday soccer game, Alan Twigg couldn’t remember the names of his two sons or his wife-and he couldn’t hold a pen. An emergency CAT scan revealed a large brain tumour squeezed against his motor cortex. ‘Intensive Care’ tells the story of why this was a good thing. ‘Intensive Care’ isn’t a medical survival story; it’s a yearlong reflection on how the imminence of death can enhance life. The grass gets greener. Confirmation that one is loved is exhilarating, more powerful than any drug. On May 26th, ‘The Globe & Mail’ ran a front page story about a recent medical study that concluded one in five Canadians will have a tumour in their head at some point in their lives. Two days later, Dr. Christopher Honey, a neurosurgeon at Vancouver General Hospital, removed the benign tumour from Alan Twigg’s head during a five-hour operation. He started writing again, in the Intensive Care ward, three hours later.
Interdependent Magic: Disability Performance in Canada is a collection of plays and interviews by, for, and about Disabled theatre artists that invites readers into the magical worlds of Disability arts culture.
The book features four plays as well as an interview with artist Niall McNeil. In Smudge by Alex Bulmer, a woman details her journey toward Blindness, mourning what she loses and discovering what her other senses provide. Access Me by Boys in Chairs Collective is a celebration of sex and Disability, providing an all-access safe space to spin around. Antarctica by Syrus Marcus Ware imagines a world where racialized people have survived multiple catastrophes and must begin terraforming a new colony. And in Deafy by Chris Dodd, a Deaf public speaker takes the audience on an unexpected journey of discovering what it really means to belong.
An immaculately constructed page-turner full of secrets and hardships
“Michelle Berry’s uncanny fifth novel reminds us that even the most seemingly ordinary neighborhoods may be anything but . . . Berry successfully builds suspense and plays on the reader’s sense of paranoia by cleverly alluding to moments of potential disaster that never materialize.” — Quill & Quire
The inhabitants of Edgewood Drive in the small Canadian town of Parkville seem to live simple, peaceful lives, but as the children attend elementary school and the senior ladies play Leisure League hockey, secrets and hardships and menaces lurk not far from the surface. This suspenseful novel takes us into a community and reveals the life and happiness — as well as the fear and sorrow — of those who call it home.
Writing about everything from missile launches to fertility, a canary that loves soap operas and a smooth talking suicide, Robin Potter explores what we’re like inside; she writes about those odd little thoughts we all have and all try to ignore.
Moving with nomadic grace across the terrain of his previous book, Decompositions, the poetic language of Ken Belford in Internodes shares similar roots, traversing decades at the speed of a search query – pressing onward through Hazelton, the Bulkley Valley, and the unroaded headwaters of the Nass River in the Damdochax Valley – and meanwhile coming to terms with a poetry that “is lived” on the rugged streets of Prince George.
In this twenty-first-century evolution, and one may say “mutation,” of Marshall McLuhan’s oft-repeated adage that “the medium is the message,” Belford’s text takes into account the nature of viral marketing and the impact of similar forms of social “trending” on our lives and our language, challenging linearity and order in favour of a work that may be read forward or backward or experienced with an abrupt sense of intimacy, in media res.
Whether reflecting upon the internodal segment that is a vital part of a nerve cell; upon the relationship between the nodes and internodes of a plant stem; or upon the internode merely as an interstice of jargon amid connections we forge through high-speed telecommunication and wireless networks, the text invites the reader to make an informed decision before inviting others to “Like,” to “Favourite,” or to otherwise invest their social currency in Internodes.
In addition to perceiving the poem as the “means of transmission” over time, Belford’s poetic lines welcome readership as a form of collaborative action and agency in an age of crowdsourcing and flash mobs – and also as a form of ongoing social process that is sensitive to the life and demise of many of the decision trees that ultimately nourish our wavering notions of the future.
An early member of the avant-garde TISH group, which turned Canadian poetry for the first time to a focus on language, Marlatt’s career has spanned five decades and a range of formal styles and concerns. Intertidal: The Collected Earlier Poems offers Marlatt’s perceptual and Vancouver-centric work of the 1970s, her feminist writing of the 1980s, and her later collaborative work. Intertidal collects a broad selection of this poet’s groundbreaking work, including poetry from sixteen published collections and a number of previously unpublished or uncollected poems. The volume contains:
Frames of a Story (1968)
leaf leaf/s (1969)
What Matters: Writing (1968–1970)
Vancouver Poems (1972)
Our Lives (1972–1975)
Steveston (1974)
“Month of Hungry Ghosts” (1979)
“A Lost Book” (1970s)
“Here and There” (1981)
How Hug a Stone (1983)
Touch to My Tongue (1984)
Salvage (1991)
“small print” (1993)
“Sea Shining Between,” “Impossible Portraiture,” “Tracing the Cut” (2002)
“Generation, generations …” (Coda to the 3rd edition of Steveston, 2001)
Between Brush Strokes (2008)
The later chapbook, Between Brush Strokes, is reproduced in full-colour, facsimile edition. The collection includes an introduction by Susan Holbrook as well as a complete bibliography of the work of this West Coast, deconstructionist, lesbian, and feminist writer. Intertidal is the definitive oeuvre of Daphne Marlatt’s poetry exploring the city, feminism, and collaboration.
This is the third volume in a new series of collected works published by Talonbooks. The first two are Peacock Blue: The Collected Poems of Phyllis Webb and Scree: The Collected Early Poems of Fred Wah, 1962–1991.
Interwoven Wild: An Ecologist Loose In the Garden begins with an intimate look at Don Gayton in his BC garden with his dog Spud. Striking a series of premises – the first one being that gardening is essentially an irrational act – he logically and humorously begins to unravel the work and rituals of gardening. Engaging the reader with real gardening experiences, Gayton takes us on the microscopic steps of a gardening season and his interest in ecological succession. While commenting on the inter-reliance of species, types of soil, why weeds invade, how foreign planets appear, insects, disease and frost, he also speculates on gardeners — their needs to landscape, to purchase specialized tools, to use chemicals, to emotionally bond with trees, shrubs, flowers and vegetables.
The “back story” of Interwoven Wild is much more universal. In it Gayton uses his experiences as a working field ecologist to place the garden in the larger context of our present natural world. By interlocking artists such as Monet and Caravaggio; writers such as Walt Whitman, Thoreau, Emily Dickenson, and Ann Dowden; park designer Frederick Law Olmstead, and landscape architect Christopher Alexander, Gayton reminds us that the garden has long held sway in the creative consciousness. His brief excursions into history, whether tracing the apple back to Kazakhstan, explaining how the tulip made its way from Turkey to Holland, or how the industrialist Baylock’s introduction of a smuggled Asian cherry tree destroyed the BC cherry orchids fascinate as well as instruct. For Gayton, the garden is a primordial human urge — a gift, celebration, and revelation buried in human psyche, marked in our collective mythologies –a kind of magical glue binding world culture, science and economics.
A stunning first book from one of the Chinese-Canadian community’s most insightful and grippingly honest young voices, Intimate Distances is a deep exploration of the vicissitudes of interpersonal connection and family relationships. Lam writes poignantly and vividly about her background: her father’s early death during her childhood, the end of marriage, the gradual loss of her mother to Alzheimer’s and, most recently, childbirth.
Intimate Letters comprises the seventh book of an ongoing long poem in prose called The Invisible World Is in Decline. Its title borrows from a string quartet by Leo Jánacek, a profoundly emotional piece written late in the composer’s life when he had fallen in love with a younger woman. It also points towards the intimacy of letters themselves, the visible pieces that make up language. This collection begins with love poems, then moves to a section (“Wretched in This Alone”) dominated by loss. The “Invisible Ghazals” which follow take language and emotions more deeply into a sense of dispossession, a landscape of the heart characterized by feeling unmoored. “Desire,” the final poem, and the only piece in conventional poetic lines, attempts to rescue the heart from bleakness by proposing that passion does survive even the most difficult and demanding experiences, and “runs through our days like / music.”