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Showing 33–39 of 39 results
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The Cyborg Anthology
$20.00Poems written by Cyborgs in the future – this collection melds sci-fi and poetry, human and machine.
The Cyborg Anthology takes place in a future where there was a thriving world of Robots and Cyborgs living peacefully beside Humans, but a disaster destroyed all Robot and most Cyborg life.
The book is organized like a typical anthology of literature, split into sections that include a biography of each poet and a sample of their poetry. It covers early Cyborg poetry, political, celebrity, and pop culture poets, and ends with the next generation of Cyborg poets.
The narrative takes place in the time after a cataclysmic event, and the collection wrestles with this loss. Through the lives of the poets, the book chronicles the history of personhood for technological beings, their struggle for liberation, and demonstrates different ways a person can be Cyborg. The poems and biographies together tell the story of a complex and enthralling world-to-come, exploring topics that are important in the future, and also urgent right now.
“With mordant wit and a playful satiric touch, these Cyborg poems showcase a dazzling range of poetic forms and ideas: imaginative and charmingly subversive. Move over Norton Anthology of Poetry, there’s a new force in town, and they are a delight.” –Renée Sarojini Saklikar, author of Listening to the Bees and Children of Air India
“The premise of this collection alone is fabulous. The poems are potent and powerful. With echoes of Le Guin, Brunner and Monáe, Lindsay B-e’s debut is layered and smart, provocative, and deeply satisfying. I was moved and fascinated. Speculative poetry at its best.” –Hiromi Goto, author of Chorus of Mushrooms and Darkest Light
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The Girls with Stone Faces
$20.00A long poem memorializing the art and lives of sculptors Frances Loring and Florence Wyle.
Arleen Paré, in her first book-length poem after her Governor General Literary Award-winning Lake of Two Mountains, turns her cool, benevolent eye to the shared lives of Florence Wyle and Frances Loring, two of Canada’s greatest artists, whose sculptures she comes face to face with at the National Gallery of Canada. In the guise of a curator, Paré takes us on a moving, carefully structured tour through the rooms where their work is displayed, the Gallery’s walls falling away to travel in time to Chicago (where they met at art school and fell in love in the 1910s), New York, and Toronto (where they lived and worked for the next six decades). Along the way, Paré looks at fashions in art, the politics of gender, and the love that longtime proximity calls forth in us. The Girls with Stone Faces is one of the finest collections of poetry about the lives of artists–and most importantly their work–to appear in Canada in many years.
Although Wyle and Loring were well known during their lifetimes, they have dropped out of common memory. Paré’s collection is art loving art, women loving women, words loving shape, poetry loving stone, the curve of jaw, the trajectory of days.
“… Like the sculpted female figures she describes as ‘tacking their bodies against the history of storm,’ Paré has positioned her own graceful, finely chiselled lines to recast the history of women in art, in society, in love.” –Anita Lahey
“… A distinctive and memorable book, sympathetic and gloriously questioning.” –Stephanie Bolster
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The Grey Islands
$20.00Deluxe redesign of a seminal book by Canada’s former Parliamentary Poet Laureate. Includes new material.
On the occasion of the press’s 40th anniversary, Brick Books is proud to present the second of six new editions of classic books from our back catalogue. This new edition of The Grey Islands features a foreword by scholar Adrian Fowler and a detailed and insightful look back at the book and the time of its inception by Steffler himself. Featuring a new cover and design by the renowned typographer Robert Bringhurst.
The Grey Islands is the story of one man’s pilgrimage to a remote island of Newfoundland’s northern peninsula. Using a broad range of styles, The Grey Islands delivers the bite of raw experience and embraces existence at the edge in all its terror and beauty.
Bent, I circle the building grubbing and rooting. Every shingle and stick I lift yields bait. Things Carm ate and didn’t eat, turned to worms. A kind of organic shadow of the man.
–from “The Grey Islands”
Praise for The Grey Islands: “[The book] illustrates… how the outsider becomes an insider by becoming a supplicant, renouncing the role of saviour and honouring the culture of the people among whom he has decided to make his home.” –Adrian Fowler, from the Introduction.
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The Knowing Animals
$20.00Poems that sing, in various notes of female voice, the human being as an embodied, contemplative, feeling animal.
In Skov-Nielsen’s thrumming debut, The Knowing Animals, our consciousness is interconnected with the surrounding trees, bugs, rivers, atmospheres, and cosmos. Here, flowers escape Victorian domestication and ally with girls’ green powers of attraction. Here, the social politeness of motherly domesticity and the raw dangers of adolescent sexual awakening are shot through with blood pulsing under the skin, with oxygen exchanged in gasps of breath. Here, everything tender and petalling is also raw and mothervisceral.
This is a book of entanglements: the poems twist and turn through a plurality of metaphorical associations involving botany, zoology, astronomy, biology, psychology, and mythology to complicate and expand human conceptions of nature. At the same time, they explore themes such as motherhood, pregnancy and birth, sexuality, adolescence, and the rise of technology, all the while shifting through a variety of tones: romantic, mythological, religious, scientific, wistful, and playful.
“These poems prod and sing, distilling language with technical precision and the intimacy of a perceptive mind at work. Skov-Nielsen speaks to the urgency of the world we inhabit, particularly attuned to how the personal is entangled with the ecological. The Knowing Animals is incisive and insightful, a debut that rouses us into a realm ‘suspended between the gutter / and the incandescent bulb of sky.’” –Cassidy McFadzean, author of Hacker Packer and Drolleries
“Saturated and prowling with a mesmerizing, tear-away cast of nocturnal animals, satellites, fireflies, toadstools, and Instagram characters playing their hands fast and loose–they may lay claim to this lush book, but don’t be lulled or gulled. These daring, over-the-top, five-sided, lyrical poems will keep you awake, basking in fever-bright light, rewilding and transforming your life, if you let them through the door.” –Jan Conn, author of Tomorrow’s Bright White Light
“The Knowing Animals drops an omniscient wild into multi-generational domesticity. Skov-Nielsen’s poems burst cellular, a corporeal blossoming that mistakes technology for bird call, often blurring the line between human-animal identities. Like a live rabbit freed from the fox’s mouth, these poems twitch to run.” –Emily Nilsen, author of Otolith
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Unidentified Poetic Object
$20.00Poems that highlight an excess, an emptiness, and a wilderness on the other side of use.
In Unidentified Poetic Object, his twelfth collection of poetry, Brian Henderson strikes from language an “alphabet of lightning”: an animacy and urgency in which every object is potent with actions, past and present; every action is alive with the potential of what it might move in the world. And since every object is more than we know in our eagerness to turn it to human use, Henderson wants us to dive into that unknown space.
The world is composed of astonishing things, but we are obsessed by their use, their categorization, their systemization, their exploitation–a way of being in which every thing, every body, even the future, can be made available as raw resource. The words in these poems are perturbations or seductions rather than representational resources, are equivocal rather than instrumental; they seek to disrupt the order of the discursive, to trouble the elaborate plans humans have for managing and controlling the earth we abuse. Here words open to produce surprising ephemeral hybridities, things without theory or history or a notion of progress. They elide and interpenetrate, shout and are silent, and in those material interactions there emerges a resonant attention and a politic of tenderness.
“Prismatic, at times apocalyptic, always sharp, Brian Henderson’s poems range through physics, visual art, philosophy, history, and, of course, poetry, to probe the locales where worlds slip into other worlds. …these rich riffs evoke deconstructed landscapes that expose the ruptures caused by settler colonialism. Laced with wit and a voracious mind, these poems are ‘unsettling’ in the best possible sense.” –Jeanette Lynes
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What Kind of Man Are You
$20.00What does it mean to be a man now?
The answers in these poems are bold and deeply moving.The poems in Degan Davis’s debut collection, What Kind Of Man Are You, move between the title’s societal taunt (prove yourself) and its more tender and inquisitive question (how to be a man in this era?). Davis has guts; he trusts the voice of a poem to draw out those truths that in lesser hands might render us mute. The writing navigates the spaces between traditional male archetypes and 21st century possibilities, through the lenses of music, tribes, war, divorce, sex, and love.
Davis is both impish and an old soul, and his poems are as comfortable riffing on big topics as they are when he’s maneuvering language with a musician’s cadence. As a result, the work is instantly engaging and thoroughly human. Why read Degan Davis? Because his work is full of joy. Because, to him, poetry matters.
“… Rejecting both rhetoric and brute force as supreme, this book lives as equally in the heart as the mind. It’s had a drink or two with Lowell, Bly, and Carver. It’s found a church of sorts in jazz and blues. As readers, we find ourselves witnessing this sensitive exploration during an historical moment in which What Kind of Man Are You may emerge as one of the most urgent questions.” –Stevie Howell
“If you could strip us of our insolent and taciturn practices, deny us our drunken and garrulous escapes, and encourage our tongues to talk the truth, these are some of the things men might say about what, and how, they feel.” –Michael Winter
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Wittgenstein Elegies
$20.00New and revised edition of an early work by the Governor General’s Award-winning poet.
On the occasion of the press’s 40th anniversary, Brick Books is proud to present the last of our six new editions of classic books from our back catalogue. This edition of Wittgenstein Elegies features an expansive Introduction by Sue Sinclair, a new Afterword by the author and a new cover and design by the renowned typographer Robert Bringhurst.
First published in 1986, Wittgenstein Elegies is a polyphonic poem in five parts. It establishes the parameters of a long conversation between logic and the lyre that has continued over multiple books and in multiple genres. Long out of print, this revised edition is both a must-have for Zwicky’s readers and a perfect introduction to her work.
“Here was the one guy in recent history who appeared to have got it right and he was being taught all wrong. I wroteWittgenstein Elegies in an attempt to respond to this state of affairs. I wanted to draw attention to the unity of Wittgenstein’s life and work. I hoped to show how profoundly he experienced the moral dimensions of language’s relation to the world.” –Jan Zwicky, from the Afterword
“Zwicky shows us that there is a way of speaking that leaves room for what cannot be spoken.” –Sue Sinclair, from the Introduction