Brick Books Select

Governor General’s Award-winning poet Arleen Paré combines the story of two first best friends with questions of the mystery of cosmic first cause.

The poems in First, Arleen Paré’s seventh collection, search for a long-lost first friend. They conjure the subtle layers of meaning in that early friendship to riff on to a search for how we might possibly understand the primal First: the beginnings of the cosmos that contains our own particular lives, beginnings and longings.

This layered evocation of the past–of childhood in 1950s Dorval, “a green mesh of girls friendships and fights”–and the intensity of the desire to know, give First its haunting beauty. “[T]he word though old fashioned,” Paré writes, “is whence . . . unconditioned origins” when “no worthy question is ever answered on the same plane that it was asked; how to frame the question not knowing the plane on which I must ask it.”

“Arleen Paré’s First is an intriguing Gertrude Stein as Nancy Drew mystery. Using prose poem narrative and an intense syntactic poetics, Paré discovers the cracks in memory as she documents the search for her first best friend. The cracks in this lyrical puzzle are heightened by a very active and assertive poetic language that compels as it decodes the investigation of childhood memory and desire. The writing in First demonstrates a powerful juxtaposition of the continuous present with the continuous past.” –Fred Wah

“This brilliant collection revolves around firsts, especially a first friend, ‘the impress of her never gone.’ So too with these poems–tough, sweet and poignant, so surely rendered and musically rich–the impress of these poems never gone.”–Lorna Crozier

Griffin Award-winner returns with new poems that are spacious with interiority, alive with a hard-earned lightness.

Waves carried a glass float–designed to hold up a fishing net–across the Pacific. Beached it safely. Someone’s breath is inside it.

In Glass Float, her seventh collection, award-winning poet Jane Munro considers the widening of horizons that border and shape our lives, the familiarity and mystery of conscious experience, and the deepening awareness that comes with a dedicated practice such as yoga. This book is about connections: mind and body; self and others; physical and metaphysical; art and nature; west and east, north and south.

In “Convexities,” the book’s opening poem, Munro quotes the grandfather who taught her to paint: “art is suggestion; art is not representation.” No concavities, he said. Only the “little hummocks” that her pencil outlined as she did contour drawings. Munro’s deft suggestion, her tracing of convexities, conveys underlying complexities, not by explication, but by looking with eyes and heart open to where mysteries almost surface.

US

bubbles
says the baby, looking
out the window at snowflakes

the old man tears up

two
characteristics
of the human animal–
to speak, to weep

both
move me
are you moved
by words–by tears

“Like glass floats themselves, these neat, clear poems contain Munro’s breath. They cross oceans. Jane Munro’s Glass Float–part travelogue, part journal, part meditation–picks up where Blue Sonoma ends: the speaker finds herself alone, at the live edge of her life. … You are not merely called on to look at yourself but to ‘receive your face.’ A gift.” –Ian Williams, author of Reproduction