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For thirty-five years, award-winning poet Gary Barwin has been opening up new ways of being in poetry. In this long-awaited new and selected volume, For It Is a Pleasure and a Surprise to Breathe, Barwin and his editor, Alessandro Porco, have drawn from his extensive writings ... Read more
For thirty-five years, award-winning poet Gary Barwin has been opening up new ways of being in poetry. In this long-awaited new and selected volume, For It Is a Pleasure and a Surprise to Breathe, Barwin and his editor, Alessandro Porco, have drawn from his extensive writings in previously published books, chapbooks, small press works, magazine and journal publications, as well from unpublished and uncollected works, to create a category-defying collection. With audacity and the occasional wisecrack and pun, too, his work uses a variety of forms and styles to investigate aesthetics, identity, culture, ecopoetics and questions of language. Throughout, Barwin stretches language to its fullest extent, whether he's exploring alternative translations or working with visual poems that explore and exploit the borderblur between poetry and art. This collection will surprise, delight and move readers, and it establishes Barwin as one of Canada's most accomplished and important poets.
Gary Barwin is a writer, composer, multimedia artist, and educator and the author of 17 books of poetry and fiction as well as books for both teens and children. His most recent poetry collection is Moon Baboon Canoe (Mansfield Press, 2014.) A novel, Yiddish for Pirates will appear with Random House Canada in 2016. Sonosyntactics: Selected and New Poetry of Paul Dutton, introduced and edited by Barwin, will appear from Wilfrid Laurier University Press in spring 2015.Barwin is the winner of the 2013 City of Hamilton Arts Award (Writing), the Hamilton Poetry Book of the Year 2011, and co-winner of 2011 Harbourfront Poetry NOW competition.
Praise for Gary Barwin
"Author Gary Barwin . . . is producing some of the most innovative creative works of our time." - Utne Reader
"Among contemporary poets, Barwin stands out as exceptional for his ability to plunder the synesthetic splendor of words. His poems seem to lift from the printed page and nosedive into other sensory dimensions . . . Under Barwin's gaze, the world as we know it is continually stretched, jolted, and tweaked." - Foreword Reviews
"Barwin's poems are struck through with a wide-eyed wonder, and when they aren't revelling in the sound of language or crafting crazed imaginings, they work to dig out the strangeness of the everyday." - Winnipeg Free Press
"As adept at lyricism as he is at the more conceptual poetries he tends to favour. It's not every poet who can display a decided mastery of the Oulipian N+7 noun substitution method in one poem, and break your heart in the next, but Barwin has the skill and versatility to do just that." - Fiddlehead
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This week we shared our summer reading picks, chatted with publisher Book*hug Press about our #ALUbookclub pick Polar Vortex, talked writing and rituals with Gary Barwin, and more!
Author of the collection For It Is a Pleasure and A Surprise to Breathe (Wolsak and Wynn), award-winning poet Gary Barwin joins us to talk more about his own fluid definition of ritual, the wonders of language and the "hurly-burly" of life as it's happening over any kind ... Read more
This week we cheered for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction winner (André Alexis, Days by Moonlight from Coach House Books), chatted with cover designer Kilby Smith-McGregor, relearned some devastating truths about our food consumption, shared some stellar weekend reads, and ... Read more
Designer Kilby Smith-McGregor takes us through the various iterations of cover art for Gary Barwin's audacious and wise-cracking collection of poetry For It Is a Pleasure and a Surprise to Breathe (Wolsak & Wynn). We learn more about how Kilby's final design for the book ... Read more
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