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Nature
All Books in this Collection
Showing 33–41 of 41 results
Re-Origin of Species
$18.00Winner of RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers
Winner of CBC Poetry Prize
Shortlisted for the 2020 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award
Longlisted for the 2020 Pat Lowther Memorial AwardFrom hybrid bodies to shifting landscapes, Re-Origin of Species blurs the lines of the real. These poems journey through illness and altered states to position disability and madness as evolutionary traits; skilled adaptations aligned with ecological change.
A lyric contemplation of our relationship to the environment, this book looks at the interdependence of species. Weaving personal narratives with a study of the insect kingdom, it draws parallels between human illness, climate change, and the state of peril in the natural world.
Rising Tides
$24.95Ice melt; sea level rise; catastrophic weather; flooding; drought; fire; infestation; species extinction and adaptation; water shortage and contamination; intensified social inequity, migration and cultural collapse. These are but some of the changes that are not only predicted for climate changing futures, but already part of our lives in Canada. Although these transformations are global and dramatic, they are also experienced locally and particularly by people who are struggling to understand the impacts of climate change on their daily lives.
Rising Tides is a collection of short fiction, creative non-fiction, memoir and poetry addressing the past, present and future of climate change. Bringing stories about climate change–both catastrophic and subtle–closer to home, this new anthology inspires reflection, understanding, conversation and action. With more than forty purposefully written pieces, Rising Tides emphasizes the need for intimate stories and thoughtful attention, and also for a view of climate justice that is grounded in ongoing histories of colonialism and other forms of environmental and social devastation.These stories parallel the critical issues facing the planet, and imagine equitable responses for all Canadians, moving beyond denial and apocalypse and toward shared meaning and action.
Contributors to the anthology include established writers, climate change experts from different backgrounds and front-line activists: Carleigh Baker, Stephen Collis, Ashlee Cunsolo, Ann Eriksson, Rosemary Georgeson, Hiromi Goto, Laurie D. Graham, David Huebert, Sonnet L’Abbe, Timothy Leduc, Christine Lowther, Kyo Maclear, Emily McGiffin, Deborah McGregor, Kevin Phillip Paul, Richard Pickard, Holly Schofield, Betsy Warland, Evelyn White, Rita Wong and many more.
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.
Still Point
$16.95Still Point examines North America as unified whole and disrupted centre
The poems in Still Point contrast the calm and tumult of Hurricane Katrina, the deconstruction of Detroit, the financial crisis of 2008, and the BP Gulf oil spill, weaving lyrical sequences and individual pieces into a coherent whole focused on humanity’s relationship to itself and to nature. Still Point tells a story of beauty and horror, and how normalcy stubbornly persists amid history’s arc.
“E Martin Nolan’s Still Point is [a] debut of remarkable talent.”—Canadian Literature
“When a book is this good, what to say? Without rhetoric, in intimate detail, Nolan nails it.”—Rosemary Sullivan, Stalin’s Daughter
Tar Swan
$19.95Shortlisted for the 2019 Raymond Souster Award!
Finalist for the City of Calgary W.O. Mitchell Book Prize!Tar Swan is a multi-voiced reckoning that surveys the mythos of the Alberta oil sands with an approach that is both lyrical and experimental. The poems feature four voices: an oil sands developer, his plant mechanic, an archaeologist excavating the remains of the operation in the present day, and a mythical swan. David Martin’s debut collection is comprised of expansive and richly written poems, built on a lore-laden language, which explore the human and environmental cost of drawing too much from the land. As the three humans come into contact with the otherworldly swan, the voices bubble and churn together, and what is distilled is a psychological breakdown paralleling the toll taken on the earth.
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
Weathervane
$18.95A book of poems that?s as unpredictable as the seasons that guide it, Weathervane is part eco-tourism, part domestic nocturne, and part tempest. In a shifting world, Mark Sampson resounds like a modern Zeus, advising his readers to ?wear galoshes, / even if it doesn?t rain.? Weathervane is an intensely personal, alchemical debut from an accomplished new voice.
What the Soul Doesn’t Want
$16.95In her newest collection, Lorna Crozier describes the passage of time in the way that only she can. Her arresting, edgy poems about aging and grief are surprising and invigorating: a defiant balm. At the same time, she revels in the quirkiness and whimsy of the natural world: the vision of a fly, the naming of an eggplant, and a woman who – not unhappily – finds that cockroaches are drawn to her.
“God draws a life. And then begins to rub it out / with the eraser on his pencil.” Lorna Crozier draws a world in What the Soul Doesn’t Want, and then beckons us in. Crozier’s signature wit and striking imagery are on display as she stretches her wings and reminds us that we haven’t yet seen all that she can do.
Wild Madder
$20.00Poems that stride bravely into the day-to-day, recovering the misdirected intensity at its core.
Brenda Leifso’s Wild Madder is about way-finding–through those moments in which you no longer recognize where you are. It’s about not knowing–who you are anymore, how to be in the world, how to love. It’s about what’s unspoken and about what speaks–conversation with the wild and animate world. It’s about marriage, family, motherhood–the drudgery in them and the quiet beauty.
This is lyric poetry wracked with pain, rage, and longing. In the beginning, the collection may read as though it’s been steeped in bitterness. Family can ask everything of a partner and parent and then turn around and take even more; Wild Madder feels like a note in a bottle washed up on the shores of a rough sea. But Leifso is not one to stand still or cling to darkness; in fact, we end up so far into the darkness that when she breaks through into light, it’s a conflagration of all the things that make us human.
These frank, bracingly recognizable poems will be irresistible–and cathartic–for anyone who has ever felt their life chewing them into little pieces.
“Brenda Leifso writes fearless poetry. Wild Madder turns the domestic inside out, revealing the ‘promise of thunder’ in the familiar. Hers is a generous voice, yet at the same time it is a charged one, calling us into the ‘long-toothed sun’. This is a book of fierce delights.” –Anne Simpson