All Books

Whether misreading sixth?grade pedagogical materials or offering visual schematics for reading Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, Jon Paul Fiorentino’?s sixth poetry collection asks us to reconsider our engagement with received information —?? but does so with a wink during detention, a dodgeball to the gut during recess.

‘Needs Improvement is as a book of a new logic making its way from witty statements to slow moving alyric villanelles, achieving brilliantly a contemporary sense of streaming among words, places and “no self.” Whether this feeling comes from rearranged intentions, satirical knowledge, wise and displaced arguments, each page points a finger at language and does so with “no fears.”‘ ? —?? Nicole Brossard

Zolf’s powerful follow-up to the Trillium Award-winning Human Resources is a virtuoso polyvocal correspondence with the daily news, ancient scripture and contemporary theory that puts the ongoing conï¬?ict in Israel/Palestine firmly in the crosshairs. Plucked from a minefield of competing knowledges, media and public texts, Neighbour Procedure sees Zolf assemble an arsenal of poetic procedures and words borrowed froma cast of unlikely neighbours, including Mark Twain, Dadaist Marcel Janco, blogger-poet Ron Silliman and two women at the gym. The result is a dynamic constellation where humour and horror sit poised at the threshold of ethics and politics.

‘Neighbour Procedure … pack[s] an intellectual punch that reminds us, once again, of the powerhouse generations of innovative feminist poets that continually challenge and transform our understanding of what poetic texts can do.’

– Matrix Magazine

‘This is an extraordinary collection of poems, and yet I hesitate in saying this, since something happens to poetry in these pages, so I no longer know what precisely poetry is or can be. In fact, Rachel Zolf brings an incredible range of readings to bear on the poetic line. If there is a mixing of media within these lines, there is also a proliferation of tongues, an effort to let language collide to produce a more acute and anguished experience of war. Israel and Palestine recur in the fits and starts of meditation offered here where language follows unpredictable sequences and finds itself suddenly stuttering in its vowels. There is mourning, rage and some brave and difficult effort to speak across traditions, languages, to avow loss, to expose the colder rationalities of occupation and war, and a linguistic fathoming of the ethics of proximity. This is courageous and moving work that feels like the struggle of a lifetime condensed into potent lines.’ – Judith Butler

‘Politics and poetry are a volatile mix. Yes, except that the voices of war and terrorism are themselves defiantly both. Zolf shows us this truth, and so her lyrics s(t)ing, acidly.’ – George Elliott Clarke, author of George and Rue

‘Neighbour Procedure is the most realized conceptual-modular book of political poetry I’ve read to date; Zolf’s language-motion escapes several nation-states’ culture capture zones while re-threading the very notion of self-representational purposivity.’ – Rodrigo Toscano

‘This book is a sharp, painful cry against the tyranny of the monologic.’ – Charles Bernstein

‘There is a madness in thinking the problem of Israel and Palestine can be thought through or sorted out, a philosophical conundrum or puzzle of language; and there’s a despair in thinking that reason has lost its right, leaving all to violence. In Neighbour Procedure, Zolf chooses madness, but yields to despair her suspicion that reason never had a right – only a discourse of ruins, monuments and counter-monuments to hope.’ – Benjamin Friedlander

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 most intimate fears.

Despite their dark and often cinematic approach, these poems are also tinged with a sly, apocalyptic wit that can’t help but laugh as the sky falls.

Nerve Squall is a vital exploration of the symbiosis of storm, nerve and language, a sure-handed guide to the end of the world.

‘Legris loves language, the way it radiates, not just for what it can say by syntactic regularity and accumulation, but for its cellular resonances … Powerful resonance is created over a whole page with a minimum of words, in a sculpture that hardly qualifies as verse as we commonly know it. But there is no question that it is poetry, and [that it] is the use of words at its most pared. Here is Legris’ brilliance, her knife-edged attention at its finest.’

– Open Letter

This volume includes work from each of Daphne Marlatt’s earlier books of poetry: Frames of a Story, leaf leaf/s, Rings, Vancouver Poems, Steveston and Our Lives; from the forthcoming What Matters; the prose work Zócalo; magazine selections from Imago and The Capilano Review and unpublished work.

In Never Mind, Katherine Lawrence constructs a centuries-old immigrant tale that is fiercely feminist, surprisingly modern, and darkly funny. The voice in these exquisite poems is a 19^th century woman who straddles both old and new worlds as she navigates her own interior landscape. Observations are wry, intimate, and shot with musicality.

This muscular collection pays tribute to the long poem while extending the tradition with fragments from letters, diary entries, sketches, dialogue, and an ongoing communion with the natural world. “Who knocks?” asks Wife in Never Mind. “Maple leaves reddened with gossip — Come in.”

New star in the longpoem sky, Never Mind by Katherine Lawrence gets cunning on page 5 and stays that way, throwing open the shutters of self, family, history, nation. Its language settles toward, while reaching free of, a narrative we expect but have not seen quite this way. Its open forms give but don’t give in. We’ll be grateful for this book.

–Gerald Hill, author of Hillsdale Book

Layered, distinctive, and adventurous, Katherine Lawrence’s Never Mind seems set in the past but vaults into a future poetic. At once ethereal and concrete, her words, through erasure and oblique reference, invite engagement and speculation. They make you mind.

–Steven Ross Smith, author of Emanations: Fluttertongue 6

Lyricism and beauty, loss and awe, horror and grief–these poems comprise an unflinching portrait of a woman (and artist) who spends a lifetime asking herself: “What brought me here?”

–Patricia Young, author of Night-Eater and An Auto-erotic History of Swings