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"This collection comes highly recommended. It is a sparkling, vigorous debut and bodes well for Ms. Berkeley’s future in fiction." Irish Times.
"The Swimmer in the Deep Blue Dream is a collection of stories from a young writer with enormous talent." Sunday Press.
These poems imagine the reconciliation of material reality with the spirit?s longing, through travel, the physical displacement of time and space, through contemplation, and through the unsettling of language. The submerged foundations of a ruined city, place names that recall the past, ancient statuary, a drop of water echoing in an empty tomb, personal memories, heat left on a path walked by generations?these remnants of passage are examined intensely, often through a lens rippled by water or vapour, looking back toward their origins and forward into the possibilities of transformation.
Shortlisted, Independent Publishers Book Award, Poetry
The Qingming Shanghe Tu scroll, sometimes called “Spring Festival by the River,” was thought to have been painted by Zhang Zeduan before 1127, when the Northern Song capital of Bian-Iiang was overrun by the invading Jin. Inspired by the figures in the scroll, Geddes found stories demanding to be told, tales of the droll, exacting, sometimes turbulent life of cities.
In shimmering verse, Geddes captures the voice of the painter himself and those of the underprivileged, with their not-so-subtle forms of dissent. Cleverly illustrated to intertwine East and West in dialogue, this ingenious volume juxtaposes a reproduction of the scroll that reads from back to front (experienced as Chinese reads) with Geddes’ poems, which read from front to back.
An NPR Best Book of the Year
Pierre is a young man at a crossroads. He drops out of architecture school and decides to travel to Vals in the Swiss Alps, home to a thermal springs complex located deep inside a mountain. The complex, designed by architect Peter Zumthor, had been the subject of Pierre’s thesis. The mountain holds many mysteries; it was said to have a mouth that periodically swallowed people up. Pierre, sketchbook in hand, is drawn to the enigmatic powers of the mountain and its springs, and attempts to uncover the truth behind them in the secret rooms he discovers deep within the complex. But he finds his match in a man named Valeret who is similarly obsessed, and who’d like nothing more than to eliminate his competitor.
Gorgeously illustrated, Swimming in Darkness is an intriguing, noirish graphic novel about uncovering the powerful secrets of the natural world.
Swimming into the Light is a sequence of poems charting a woman’s struggle with infertility and her entry into motherhood through the back door of international adoption. The book traces these events in a connected narrative, from her frustration and despair over infertility to the uncertainty of international adoption and rescuing a new life from a war-torn country, and finally to the quiet reflections on motherhood. Shortlisted for the QSPELL A.M. Klein Poetry award, Swimming into the Light has recently been translated into French and published by Écrits des forges as La fille au bord de l’eau.
Swimming Toward the Sun: Collected Poems 1968-2018 gathers together five decades of poetry of the accomplished Canadian poet Laurence Hutchman. He invites us to take a poetic odyssey, starting in the late 1960’s enriched by his travels to Europe, leading us through the turbulent times in cosmopolitan Montreal of the 1970’s, to a long residence in New Brunswick and finally his return to Ontario. Through a powerful and daring use of language and a haunting musicality of lines, Hutchman explores the relationship between real and imaginative landscape as he bears witness to his place and time.
In this memoir, the former president of the National Wrestling Alliance, Howard Brody gives a first hand account of how he’s been able to survive the world of pro wrestling politics, despite getting a few bloody noses along the way. Brody delves into the historical aspects of his time at the NWA, describing encounters — both good and bad — with some of professional wrestling’s most powerful and creative minds including Vince and Linda McMahon, Eric Bischoff, Paul Heyman, Tod Gordon, Antonio Inoki, Hiro Matsuda, the Funks, Dusty Rhodes, Jim Cornette, Jimmy Hart, the Hart family, Hulk Hogan, and more.
Brody describes how he got hooked on the business, how he raised money to shoot a ladies wrestling TV pilot, and how he finally ended up in the NWA, serving as its president from 1996 to 2001, and the controversy surrounding how and why he left.
Delving into the inner workings of booking and promoting shows, from dealing with talent to building managers, radio and television stations, Brody explains the differences and similarities between small, medium and large promotions, and talks about the nature of negotiating and selling wrestling to television networks and sponsors.
Swimming With Piranhas covers aspects of the pro wrestling business that have yet to be captured on paper. This book reveals the true war stories as Brody takes the reader into the boardrooms and back offices of the most exciting business in the world: professional wrestling.
This book is moving and true. Mexico begins with the shock of dislocation, entry into “the exotic”; Caribbean Odyssey feels like a darker and more troubled grappling with spirit and place (and the Bolden references are terrific.) In the third movement the traveler feels more settled; humour is available, with a kind of exhaustion around the edges that accepts the surreal almost as status quo. And then in the South Seas there’s the sense of cosmic openness, contemplation, agape. Hula Hymns celebrates the mystery, in human terms. To end on Cook’s death, shape-shifting, myth, legend, brings us full circle to dislocation, but a dislocation where all the parts are in a kind of suspension with the vision developed through the text allowing new perspective.
“A pastiche of travel, Doug Beardsley’s Spirit of Place is where the adventurous reader wants to go afar and meld with the paradisiacal of exotic places still in existence on an increasingly degradable earth. In Beardsley’s travel narratives we have the right tonic for that restless global traveller. This poet has soul and I wish soul replaced the gold standard, but in this workaday consumer world, what is to be said is truly said by Beardsley. There is biting honesty, a hard edge to this volume.” – Joe Rosenblatt
“Once again, Doug Beardsley is ‘going down into history’. In the tradition of Stevenson and Melville, he sails the waters of the South Pacific and the Caribbean in search of ‘spirit of place’. Beardsley looks beyond the invasion of ‘mahogany tourists’ and finds he cannot help ‘thinking of slavery’ and ‘sea dragons’. He meditates on those who have come before; from Cortez and Cook to Gauguin and Neruda. In Swimming with Turtles history and myth fuse with the present in fine poems like ‘Dark Hummingbird’s Dance’ and the final ‘Sacrificial Presence’.” – David Day
‘Swing In the Hollow’ is a debut collection that struggles with the service and spoil of lyrical attention. In quirky and precise turns, Knighton’s language teases a sense of phenomena from the rubbish and rubble of atrophied urban experience.
“It is wonderfully subtle and witty, with the title setting a tone for the poems to follow.” – Winnipeg Free Press
Swiss Sonata is the first novel by Gwethalyn Graham, written when she was just 25. The novel is set in a girls’ boarding school in Switzerland in 1936. What makes this novel extraordinary is not just the penetrating insights into the behaviour of the girls — echoed later in novels such as The Wives of Bath — but for her timely insights into the dark clouds of war and hatred gathering over all of Europe at the time.
Poems to read in the small hours before dawn, when the sirens start up again.
Swivelmount’s concerns – the collapse of subject and world, eros and law, knowledge and bafflement – gain new urgency as Babstock fiercely reimagines and reassembles the remnants into a viable order. At the core of their kinetic imagery is a freefall into mourning, but also a faith in others: a Babstock poem is the voice next to you in the ER waiting room, becalmed, compassionate, darkly humorous. This is Babstock at his best.
Past Praise:
“This is a poetry that is so uncompromising in how it deals with traditions – of poetic forms, of dictions, of militaristic histories – that it becomes something magnificent: brittle and hard. It will change how you think.” —Juliana Spahr for On Malice
“On Malice is a fascinating and elegiac rebuke to surveillance technologies and its discontents. Ken Babstock is a wonderful and spirited poet. His work is full of musicality, syncopation, wit, and formal acuity.” —Peter Gizzi
“The flavour of this poetry is complex – it will have to be consumed in small amounts like a sipping tequila. It inebriates quickly. It imparts a convivial brilliance to life. And it is not without its sinister edge.” —Ange Mlinko for Methodist Hatchet
“I felt as if I were reading poems written with a scalpel. Methodist Hatchet swaggers with confidence, intelligence, technique, humour, and that pinioning accuracy of observation we’ve come to expect from Babstock, surely one of the most versatile, switched-on, and linguistically savvy poets of our time.” —Simon Armitage
“Methodist Hatchet is as precise as it is expansive, as complex as it is companionable. It refuses to look away from the unstable nature of self and world and word. That is why Babstock is one of the most exciting lyric poets writing today.” —Sina Queyras, The Globe and Mail for Methodist Hatchet
Winner of the Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Poetry
The poems in Swoon speak to the steady wending of a life’s thematic drama: the falling / rising permutations across biographical phases. Indications are filtered through relationship, encounter, art, the natural world, and dream. Associations coalesce in a rhythmic clocking of feeling / thought. Randomness and accident may have a part to play, destiny and mystery, too; suggestion of a plot. There’s storyline unfolding that resists a denouement.