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Showing 17–32 of 39 results
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If You Discover a Fire
$20.00Precision-built poems that attempt CPR on their own irregular meter, on their own unreliable meaning.
Vancouver poet Shaun Robinson’s If You Discover a Fire is a debut collection of poems that make a virtue of their failure to communicate. They forage through the syntax and vocabulary of late-night voicemails, letters to the editor, songs invented in the shower, professional jargon, “Witness Wanted” signs, technical manuals, and text-message typos to assemble verbal collages that raise more questions than they answer. In settings ranging from Montreal’s Mile End to a commercial flight above the Midwest to a wildfire in the mountains of British Columbia, these are poems rooted in working-class Canadian experience, poems that flirt with both safety and danger, that drone on like drunken strangers in a bar. Gathering reference from weather reports, football announcers, aerial disappearances, and the movie Groundhog Day, these poems sound their forlorn yawp through the alleys of East Vancouver.
Out on the porch, between shots, he tells you
things you’ve always known, how the past
and the future are lovers spooning
in bed, and the present is how they don’t
quite fit together. (from “Carpe Dos and Carpe Don’ts (FT. Panda Bear)”)“Darkly comic, or just plain dark, these poems offers no assurances, but as the particulars accumulate – all-night gyms, boredom, plastic flowers, rec rooms where children in blindfolds swing wildly at air – they generate a vital, unpredictable force. Like the octopus that sets loose the lid of the jar it’s been placed in, If You Discover A Fire has the imagination to outsmart the world’s relentless conditions.” –Sheryda Warrener
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Kitotam: He Speaks to it
$20.00The Neyhiyawak (Plains Cree) word “Kitotam” translates into English as, “He Speaks to It.” This is a collection of free-verse poetry by Indigenous poet and artist John McDonald. Written in two parts, these poems chronicle John’s life and experiences as an urban Indigenous youth during the 1980s. The second half of the book is a look into the inspirations and events, that shaped John’s career as an internationally known spoken word artist, beat poet, monologist and performance artist.
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Lake of Two Mountains
$20.00A hymn to a beloved lake, a praise poem in forty-five parts, a contemplation of landscape and memory
Lake of Two Mountains, Arleen Paré’s second poetry collection, is a portrait of a lake, of a relationship to a lake, of a network of relationships around a lake. It maps, probes and applauds the riparian region of central Canadian geography that lies between the Ottawa and the St. Lawrence Rivers. The poems portray this territory, its contested human presences and natural history: the 1990 Oka Crisis, Pleistocene shifts and dislocations, the feather-shaped Ile Cadieux, a Trappist monastery on the lake’s northern shore. As we are drawn into experience of the lake and its environs, we also enter an intricate interleaving of landscape and memory, a reflection on how a place comes to inhabit us even as we inhabit it.
flint-dark far-off
sky on the move across the lake
slant sheets closing insky collapsing from its bowl
shoreline waiting taut
stones dark as plums
~from “Distance Closing In” -
Little Housewolf
$17.95Medrie Purdham‘s Little Housewolf delves deeply into the world of domestic miniatures, a realm where thimbles, baby teeth, push pins, keyholes, teacups, and wedding rings become meticulously realized scale models of one’s terrors and joys. Purdham uses the fine-grained signatures of her poetry–close observation, exact detail, precise sounds–not only to examine childhood and its fascination with size and scale, but also to measure herself against the larger, untamed landscapes she feels increasingly alienated from (“It is all anachronism, / grasses vintage wild”). Marked by bold emotion and arresting imagery, Little Housewolf is a brilliant debut.
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Moldovan Hotel
$20.00Moldovan Hotel explores the intergenerational trauma of the Holocaust in Romania through a queer Jewish voice in the Diaspora.
In 2017, Leah Horlick travelled to Romania to revisit the region her Jewish ancestors fled. What she unearthed there is an elaborate web connecting conscious worlds to subconscious ones, fascism to neofascisms, Europe to the Americas to the Middle East, typhus to HIV/AIDS, genocide in Romania to land grabs in Palestine, women’s lives in farming villages to queer lives in the city, language to its trap doors, and love to its hidden, ancestral obligations.
With force, clarity and searing craft, Horlick’s poems are equal to the urgency of our political moment. “No one ever thinks they might be the dragon,” Horlick writes, and yet history repeats its cruelties. This work takes things apart to put them profoundly back together.
“If Leah Horlick’s second book invited us to witness, this time she draws from her Jewish heritage and takes us back to show us how to read the landscape and mind-scape and tell us what the texts left out. This is an accounting, a calling, an invocation, a return, a skilful mediation on how to remember when the ‘names of the oppressors are blotted out’.” — Juliane Okot Bitek, author of 100 Days
“Every poem in Moldovan Hotel is a room thick with ghosts. Here, Horlick takes the language of the past–used to dehumanize and unmoor–and crystalizes it around revelation after revelation. A graceful, striking collection.” — Carmen Maria Machado, author of In the Dream House
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Monkey Ranch
$19.00Comic and sober by turns, these poems ask us what is sufficient, what will suffice?
… a mandrill, a middle-aged woman, a shattered Baghdad neighbourhood, a long marriage, even a spoon, grapple with this unanswerable conundrum — sometimes with rage, or plain persistence, sometimes with the furious joy of a dog who gets to ride with his head through a truck’s passenger window. Julie Bruck’s third book of poetry is a brilliant and unusual blend of pathos and play, of deep seriousness and wildly veering humour. Though Bruck “does not stammer when it’s time to speak up,” and “will not blink when it’s time to stare directly at the uncomfortable,” as Cornelius Eady says in his blurb for the book, “in Monkey Ranch she celebrates more than she sighs, and she smartly avoids the shallow trap of mere indignation by infusing her lines with bright, nimble turns, the small, yet indelible detail. Bruck sees everything we do; she just seems to see it wiser. Her poems sing and roil with everything complicated and joyous we human monkeys are.”
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Night Work
$20.00A new edition of a hockey saga, wrapping the game’s story in the “intense, moody, contradictory” character of Terry Sawchuk, one of its greatest goalies.
Denied the leap and dash up the ice,
what goalies know is side to side, an inwardness of monk
and cell. They scrape. They sweep. Their eyes are elsewhere
as they contemplate their narrow place. Like saints, they pray for nothing,
which brings grace. Off-days, what they want is space. They sit apart
in bars. They know the length of streets in twenty cities.
But it’s their saving sense of irony that further
isolates them as it saves.
– from “One of You”In compact, conversational poems, Night Work: The Sawchuk Poems follows the tragic trajectory of the life and work of Terry Sawchuk, dark driven genius of a goalie who survived twenty tough seasons in an era of inadequate upper-body equipment and no player representation. But no summary touches the searching intensity of Maggs’s poems. They range from meditations on ancient/modern heroism to dramatic capsules of actual games, in which the mystery of character meets the mystery of transcendent physical performance. Night Work: The Sawchuk Poems is illustrated with photographs mirroring the text, depicting key moments in the career of Terry Sawchuk, his exploits and his agony.
This 10th anniversary edition of the book marks both the 50th anniversary of the last time the Leafs won the Stanley Cup and the 100th anniversary of the Leafs as a team. With rich reflections on the book by novelist Angie Abdou and Hockey Night in Canada host Ron MacLean, as well as excerpts from scores of reviews by the likes of Gord Downie and Dave Bidini, this new edition of Night Work is a must-have for lovers of hockey and poetry alike.
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Our Latest in Folktales
$20.00Poems of serious wordplay–an affirmation and celebration of the spectacles we make of our lives.
On-stage in Matthew Gwathmey’s debut collection are agitated 19th century horsemen, 80s comic book beetles, plaid-clad suburban grunge enthusiasts, Korean aunts turned traffic cops, Parisian mimes–in short, “a multitude of horns.” Meanwhile, the “understories,” the sub-spectacles of these poems, are the everyday trials and thrills of marriage and family, the search for meaningful love and friendship, and the palpable relief at being able to perform not as a primary character in the cultural narrative, but as a member of an elemental audience, as “water/ at the bottom of the wind.”
Working a hand-mixer in one hand and a spade in the other, Gwathmey writes formally accomplished, linguistically playful poems with deep roots. He couples an implicit understanding of the stories passed down to us as necessary blueprints, with an occasionally nihilistic (in the spirit of the modernists) and occasionally giddy (in the spirit of the New York School) pull toward embellishment and reinvention, making these folktales rhythmic, humorous, and full of unexpected turns.
“Down out of the pilgrim wilderness of the shapeshifting, apocalyptic carnival midway of Parnassus, trailed by an entourage of troubadours, poet pro-wrestlers, lunatics, comic strip superheroes, brain scientists, cyberpyrotechnicats, emoticons, coders, and a covey of Acadian midwives spouting ancient spells, comes Matthew Gwathmey, twenty-first-century soothsayer….” –Lisa Russ Spaar
“Our latest in poetry, Matthew Gwathmey’s debut is a mishmash in the best sense, smushing superheroes, Mars colonies, psych wards, Radiohead, and a hundred other eclectic subjects into a blender for your poetry protein shake. Regardless of the reference, Gwathmey clicks words into place like Lego bricks, for precise, fun, colourful poems.” –Jonathan Ball
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Pistachios in My Pocket
$24.95Poet Sareh Farmand was born in Tehran at the start of the Islamic Revolution. In this brave first collection of poems and prose a narrative arc details her family’s escape from Iran, detailing their time as immigrants in limbo, and finally, as Landed Immigrants in Canada. Using family anecdotes, memory, public documents, and images to outline her family’s story, Pistachios in my Pocket moves from the personal to the universal by exploring the influences of migration, political strife, and cultural identity on humanity. Here is a new voice to the conversation on global citizenship and multiculturalism, as themes of loss, home, and belonging are explored in a new way through a wide socio-political lens and personal accounts of a family’s unique, yet universal experiences. Ultimately, bringing forward the many ways immigrants are haunted after fleeing for safety and what it means to be Canadian.
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Problematica
$34.95A best-of collection from one of Canada’s most ambitious poets
Problematica — a scientific term used to describe species that defy classification. See unidentifiable.
George Murray is a strange beast. Lauded as one of Canada’s leading poets, his work has been published around the world, but here at home, he has never really “fit in” with his contemporaries. By turns archly formal and thoughtful, insouciant and hilarious, each of his six books seems intent on staking out its own identity, standing alone in stark contrast to all others.
Yet, in this judicious selection of new and selected poems spanning Murray’s 25-year career, we see threads and patterns emerge like fractals. From early narrative poems to lyrical explorations of the metaphysical to investigations of the colloquial and contemporary, Murray’s work roams a landscape that includes everything from happiness to regret, love to loss, doubt to faith, anxiety to acceptance.
This collection not only represents the best of Murray’s earlier poems, but also surprises readers with a section of never-before-seen new work, revealing a life spent wrestling with what it means to arrive, live, and leave. Problematica is a considerable body of poetry from a mind that obsessively wanders the edges of thought and language, working to identify what boundaries may or may not exist.
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Reckon
$20.00Anxious, twitchy, urgent poems–a collection that’s at once sardonic and “chronically wishful.”
Reckon, Steve McOrmond’s first book of poems since his acclaimed 2010 collection The Good News about Armageddon, hones in on those fugitive moments when the parts of ourselves that have not been entirely subsumed by consumer capitalism escape their cages and come out to play–a photographer’s lifelong desire to collect snowflakes, an adolescent’s game of show-me-yours, the small, defiant act of letting a cellphone call go to voicemail. “The whole world has gone straight to voicemail,” McOrmond writes a line later.
With one foot in the physical world and one in the virtual, these poems embody the often-tense negotiations between “I” and a collective “we.” Concerned with the sweep of history and the rush of the now, McOrmond demonstrates a knack for bringing the vast and amorphous down to human size, making it personal: “How gone?/ Real gone. All our gift cards unredeemed.”
Responding to a poem from Reckon that appeared on Poetry Daily, comedian Patton Oswalt tweeted a perceptive one-liner review: “Steve McOrmond’s new poem, ‘Pure Outrage,’ is really funny and, if you read it right, kind of scary.” While at times these poems reach out from a place of isolation, across a distance greater than words, one always senses an earnest desire for connection and engagement: Here, take my hand. Maybe it’s not too late.
“Creeping dread, bemused wonder, and a species of headlong incredulity inform Steve McOrmond’s processing of the new century’s prodigious cultural jetsam, its ‘wilderness of signs’. Reckon apprehends the strangeness in the commonplace, and the anxiety humming in everyday chatter, fact and argument, whether it be live or digitized. ‘What do they open, the keys that come rotoring down from the maple trees?’ Turns out it’s complicated.” –Kevin Connolly
“The isolation and confusion of the modern age come to life in Steve McOrmond’s new book Reckon in a way that is disquieting and strangely comforting at the same time.” –Ron Sexsmith
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Riffs
$20.00Deluxe redesign of an aching solo situated at the mid-point of a long, melodious career. Includes new material.
On the occasion of the press’s 40th anniversary, Brick Books is proud to present the third of six new editions of classic books from our back catalogue. This edition of Riffs features a new introduction by the poet Paul Vermeersch, a reprint of an extended interview with Dennis Lee about the book, and a new cover and design by the renowned typographer Robert Bringhurst.
Riffs is a story of a passionate love affair, told in vintage Lee style–with whoops, deep chords, and headlong improvisational arcs. We hear Bach, Bo Diddley, Bird; the news is heartache and being. Celebratory, claustrophobic, the poem tracks ways in which eros and our lives are made mutually accountable.
Tell me what you cherish, won’t
just walk; give me lifetime,
not renege. I have no other use. Living I flubbed.
But mouth to mouth I could sometimes ache into words.–from Riffs (#85)
Praise for Riffs: “Riffs is the book that unites his various voices and lyrical personae… a book in which all of his poetic attitudes are in harmony with one another.” –Paul Vermeersch, from the Introduction.
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Short Talks
$20.00Deluxe redesign of the two-time Griffin Award winner’s first poetry collection. Includes new material.
On the occasion of the press’s 40th anniversary, Brick Books is proud to present the first of six new editions of classic books from our back catalogue. This new edition of Short Talks features a foreword by the poet Margaret Christakos, a “Short Talk on Afterwords” by Carson herself, and a new cover and design by the renowned typographer Robert Bringhurst.
First issued in 1992, this is Carson’s first and only collection of poems published with an independent Canadian press. It announced the arrival of a profound, elegiac and biting new voice. Short Talks can comfortably stand alongside Carson’s other bestselling and award-winning works.
The youth at night would have himself driven around the scream. It lay in the middle of the city gazing back at him with its heat and rosepools of flesh. Terrific lava shone on his soul. He would ride and stare.–“Short Talk on the Youth at Night”
Praise for Short Talks: “Short Talks is a unique form of slag-like poetic address that arises from the full formative force of Carson’s young embodiment of a northern Ontario mining-town winter of mind.”–Margaret Christakos, from the Introduction.
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Songs for Relinquishing the Earth
$20.00Songs for Relinquishing the Earth contains many poems of praise and grief for the imperilled earth drawing frequently on Jan Zwicky’s experience as a musician and philosopher and on the landscapes of the prairies and rural Ontario.
Songs for Relinquishing the Earth was first published by the author in 1996 as a hand-made book, each copy individually sewn for its reader in response to a request. It appeared between plain covers on recycled stock, with a small photo (of lavender fields) pasted into each copy. The only publicity was word of mouth.
Part of Jan Zwicky’s reason for having the author be the maker and distributor of the book was a desire to connect the acts of publication and publicity with the initial act of composition, to have a book whose public gestures were in keeping with the intimacy of the art. She also believed the potential audience was small enough that she could easily sew enough copies to fill requests as they came in. While succeeding in recalling poetry’s public life to its roots, she was wrong about the size of that audience and her ability to keep up with demand as word spread, Hence, this facsimile edition. In publishing it, Brick Books has attempted to remain as faithful as possible to the spirit of those original gestures, while making it possible for more readers to have access to this remarkable book.
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Standing in the Flock of Connections
$20.00Poems that skitter between life and death, “sleep and hurry,”
at their heart a kind of tender panic.By turns funny, frank, mysterious, and heartbreaking, Standing in the Flock of Connections, Heather Cadsby’s fifth collection of poetry, is one hundred proof associative thought. These poems testify to the human mind’s capacity to “do”–taking into account all of the performative, causal, athletic, and sexual connotations of that verb. Many of them come in on an overheard conversation or monologue–mid-fight, mid-stride–and the absent details and specifics often function to open up a space for things to become other things, for the flock of connections to swarm.
I love a pentagram. You can draw that thing
all day freehand, sloppy. Five-star
hotels, movies, generals. Throw it around
like it was a love number, which it is.
Cut an apple horizontally, there it is.
Draw one inside its centre pentagon and so on
nesting smaller forever. Till you call it quits
and start singing Holy etc.
(from “Sunday geometer”)Praise for Heather Cadsby:
“…verse that demonstrates wit and levity as well as a seriousness at its heart … capable of blasphemy … an honest inquiry into life and the inherent duality of the moment.” –Gillian Harding-Russell, Prairie Fire Review of Books -
Stations of the Crossed
$18.95When Carol Rose GoldenEagle was a child, attending Easter church services, she recalls the annual ritual of the priest presenting plaques depicting the stages of Christ’s persecution to his resurrection, referred to as the “stations of the cross”. Using these early teachings as a springboard for critical reflections, poems look back, but more importantly, look forward to reclaiming the gifts given by Creator within Indigenous culture. GoldenEagle’s searing new poetry collection examines the dark legacy of the residential school system, church and government doctrine, and the ongoing impacts on Indigenous peoples’ lives across Turtle Island.