The Most Charming Creatures

By (author): Gary Barwin

With uncanny wit, inventive beauty, and numinous surprise, The Most Charming Creatures explores the contemporary and its language, considering our wonder, sorrow, bewilderment, anxiety, and tenderness. While these poems energize and connect and “turn the paren- / theses inside out so that / we mean everything,” they are also alive to the alluring complicity of language and its duplicity and deceptions. “This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but / while we watch.”

A follow-up to the award-winning author’s acclaimed selected poems, this new collection continues Barwin’s examination of the possibilities of the poem: a celebration, a story, an investigation, a riff, a word machine, a parable, a transformation. But what are the “most charming creatures” of the title? In 1862, scientific illustrator Ernst Haeckel termed radiolarians (ancient single-celled organisms with mineral skeletons) “the most charming creatures,” but here Barwin turns the microscope around to consider something just as strange and mysterious: language, our culture, and the self. From microorganisms, onion rings, grief, and Gerard Manley Hopkins to beetles, neoliberalism, sandwiches, Martin Luther, and stand-up comedy, he offers: “it’s a miracle that we’ve survived / it’s a miracle that we’ve survived at all.”

AUTHOR

Gary Barwin

Gary Barwin is a writer, composer and multidisciplinary artist and the author of 26 books including Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted: The Ballad of Motl the Cowboy, which won the Canadian Jewish Literary Award. His national bestselling novel Yiddish for Pirates won the Leacock Medal for Humour and the Canadian Jewish Literary Award, was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award for Fiction and the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and was long-listed for Canada Reads.

A PhD in music composition, Barwin has been Writer-in-Residence at University of Toronto (Scarborough), Laurier, Western University, McMaster University and the Hamilton Public Library, Hillfield Strathallan College, Sheridan College and Young Voices E-Writer-in-Residence at the Toronto Public Library. He has taught creative writing at a number of colleges and universities, to at-risk youth in Hamilton through the ArtForms program and currently mentors through the Vancouver Manuscript Intensive. His writing has been published in hundreds of magazines and journals internationally and his writing, music, media works and visuals have been presented and broadcast internationally. Though born in Northern Ireland to South African parents of Ashenazi descent, Barwin lives in Hamilton, Ontario.


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Excerpts & Samples ×

I won’t claim

(for Alice Burdick)

this is all that happens
but I will say it is a true
representation of what you see here.

By the time you finish reading
you will be older. Sadder.
Wiser. If you were a flower and
you read this, you would be a flower
desired by bees.

You lie in the green bristles
friend to grass, lover of grass, ally of softness
and open like petals. That’s where
the bee gets in, shimmies through pollen.

I won’t claim the calm of sky but
you’ve got a good view there
on the grass and you think
what you can. Jams. Jellies.

Small faces floating peacefully, closed eyes
like petals. It’s your brain
that’s a can. Inside things float that last.
Summer song. An old bicycle. Beer.
Your children loving you the length of
their lengthening bones.

You sit to a bowl of clam chowder made by
daughter. A hurricane. Sugar cane.
Citizen Kane. Abel’s brother. Day seeps
over one horizon making room
for night to pour over the other

I won’t claim night
for dreams where you’re double
booked for funerals. Goodnight mother.
Grandpa. Father. Or that life

represents your life. If I had to choose
between bee and flower I’d
choose summer day.

Several Fishes Can Walk on Land

the hip bone is a sacral rib
within the fish we studied
a sacral rider —
hello

several fjords walk on landslides
walk on flashbacks
flame-throw latch-key
walk languid

the hive bookcase is a rifle
secretly walking lanterns
fistfuls waking landowners
flames milling a lasso

the hoax cooking is a sacral rig
a morphological vehicle
that secretly walks on lapels
a subject consistency

a sacral right-hander that
washes larches
morphological vendettas
secretly wilting lard

the hobo shelf is a sacral rigmarole
a submarine consonant
secretly walloping clerks
flash cubes wait laughs

secret larval welks
a wet-dream larynx
the holograph boozer’s sacral ring
a secreted lash

those with the most robust “hip”-bones have
the best walking ability
several fishes warp land

Reader Reviews

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Details

Dimensions:

128 Pages

Published:

September 20, 2022

Publisher:

ECW Press

ISBN:

9781778520266

Book Subjects:

POETRY / Canadian

Featured In:

All Books

Language:

eng

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