The Dialogues: The Song of Francis Pegahmagabow by Armand Garnet Ruffo, Nishnaabemwin translations by Brian D. McInnes (2024)
Reading this book feels like sifting through fragments of many different fragments; many different voices. Through poems, conversations, letters, newspaper clippings, and song, The Dialogues traces the tale of famous WW1 sharpshooter, Francis Pegahmagabow and explores the complexities of telling Indigenous stories.
Armand’s writing is both simple and sophisticated. It twists open the valve of some lonely and desperate part of the self and lets it exhale.
“Facts and figures, meaningless
after a few generations when
the refugee-immigrant forgets
and feels almost indigenous, but not quite
—always the angry itch—and points of finger
at those damn OTHERS. Think about it.”
—from “A word from our sponsor who stands outside the action and sees all—a God, but not a God because good God.”
“Some months after she died, he had a birthday.
It was a bright winter morning, and he opened
the back door wondering what the day would bring.
There on the fence was a large hawk, sitting
as though it had been waiting for him to come out.
He froze momentarily watching it eyeing him
and then he dashed through the snow towards it.
He thought flipped downwards and figured it could not
have gone far, but when he reached the spot
it was gone. He searched the ground,
surveyed the sky. There was
absolutely no trace of it.
Raise your left hand, your heart hand, if
something like this has happened to you.”
—from “On the Inexplicable”
The perspective in this book—the zooming in and out—is dizzying; appropriately disorienting and still, it manages to ground you. Armand doesn’t hold your hand as you negotiate a path through these pages, but his words do stay with you while you find your own way.
A beautiful, necessary read.
Blood Belies by Ellen Chang-Richardson (2024)
Good poetry is exactly what the world needs right now, perhaps more than ever. Good poetry makes no demands but through its distillation of language, thought, emotion, moment to moment, it forces us to slow down. To inhale each word, gradually.
It’s hard to rush through a good poem. You can, but you’ll miss everything.
Ellen Chang-Richardson’s debut collection, Blood Belies, is replete with phenomenal poems; with blank space and gorgeously precise lines and visual arrangements. The attention Ellen brings to the page is breathtaking. Exploring personal and collective history, pain and injury, and institutional racism, the ah-ha moments in these poems abound, so profoundly airy and expansive they settle in the bottom of your lungs.
“I want to breathe not crumble
beneath our burdens”
—from “between branches”
We recommend this collection to everyone; to the world. We recommend it as wholly and prescriptively as a life-changing drug; recommend taking it meditatively while reclining under your favourite tree, absorbing each word with your heart open and face lifted to the sun.
An exquisite book.
Imagining Imagining: Essays on Language, Identity and Infinity by Gary Barwin (2023)
Imagining Imagining is a collection of personal essays about creating art and nurturing a sense of wonder in the world—and a space for ourselves in this wonder. True to Gary Barwin’s always-absorbing writing, these essays are bursting with humour and tenderness and the sticky sweet good stuff of humanity. Barwin looks outward, to the vast universe, and inward, to the self, at a cellular level.
This is a book that resists the desensitizing effects of the echo chambers in which we live and encourages us, with love and compassion and insight, to step outside. To question and probe and marvel at our world and who we are. To explore how we become who we are.
Imagining Imagining contemplates the unruly wonder of our existence—it’s a deep and dallying conversation, and one we think you’ll keep having long after you put it down.
Celebrate Pride with Lockheed Martin by Jake Byrne (2023)
This collection of poetry is a fleet-footed fever dream, and probably one of the most staggering, breathtaking collections of poetry you’ll ever read.
Byrne’s poems are a hardcore and exceptionally powerful look at capitalism and the violence it inflicts on the human mind and body—especially queer bodies.
His words bite and tease, they ooze bawdiness and bodily fluids. They explore sexuality and our bodies as what’s exploited by the systems that control us, and what could ultimately free us from it.
The last section, HOMONATIONAL ANTHEM, was like a punch to the gut; a kiss planted full on the mouth, unexpected.
Byrne’s writing is just so gorgeously, unrepentantly hungry—for truth, connection, love, freedom. We think it speaks to the starving places in us all.
A must-read!
“My mother told me my mind was a dirty mirror / But I know no surface reflects like fire. / So hold my hand. We must move fast. Grab only what you need. / The tower between this world and the next is being built / That’s why it hurts this much to live here, and to bleed.”
—from “Cloud of Unknowing.”
Nothing Will Save Your Life by Nancy Jo Cullen (2022)
Nothing Will Save Your Life is a simultaneously haunting and cheeky collection of poems that explores how we learn to love beyond death, beyond time, beyond categorization—and not just love for others, but love for oneself.
Many pieces are nostalgic, but Cullen’s language is never somber or sullen. This collection is not a mausoleum of pain. Rather, these poems sing with warmth, pluck, and shatteringly fresh insight.
Absolutely recommend!
“When Karen Carpenter died I didn’t think of all my failed cucumber diets / I thought about the problem of the habit of obedience. / I thought how hard it is to kick the habit of obedience and how easy / to disappoint our mothers; how fat we look in our favourite dresses.”
—from “When I Was Young I’d Listen to the Radio.”
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Thanks to Hollay Ghadery at River Street Writing for sharing these can’t-miss titles from the Wolsak & Wynn backlist. You can order any of these books through All Lit Up, or click the “Shop Local” button on the book listings to discover them at your local indie bookstore.
