Download or read book Field Guide to the Lost Flower of Crete written by Eleonore Schönmaier and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2021-06-01 with total page 124 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thyme clings, high / and away from the grazing and scents / the air. Island reality is interconnected with live-retrieved memories in which a nurse follows a violent patient into the northern Canadian bush, a migrant mother faces her new job as the village butcher, an Ojibway man is forced to walk a dangerous route home alone, teenagers loot the local dump to build their mother's wheelchair, and an electrician watches a woman play a grand piano on a ballfield. A (re)creation of the surreality and altered time within deep states of grieving, Field Guide to the Lost Flower of Crete juxtaposes sorrow with fragmentary unapologetic joy. Eleonore Schönmaier forges compelling symphonic resonances between European musical encounters and a northern working-class childhood. By centring her experiential empathy on a history of racism and poverty, she guides us into better ways of being. Intimate reflections are contrasted with geopolitical and environmental concerns as Schönmaier's fierce intelligence focuses on what is most essential in our lives. The arc of this collection offers a rejuvenating meditation on the meaning of loss and love, highlighted by the lyric beauty of the writing.
Download or read book Field Guide to the Lost Flower of Crete written by Eleonore Schönmaier and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2021-06-01 with total page 123 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thyme clings, high / and away from the grazing and scents / the air. Island reality is interconnected with live-retrieved memories in which a nurse follows a violent patient into the northern Canadian bush, a migrant mother faces her new job as the village butcher, an Ojibway man is forced to walk a dangerous route home alone, teenagers loot the local dump to build their mother's wheelchair, and an electrician watches a woman play a grand piano on a ballfield. A (re)creation of the surreality and altered time within deep states of grieving, Field Guide to the Lost Flower of Crete juxtaposes sorrow with fragmentary unapologetic joy. Eleonore Schönmaier forges compelling symphonic resonances between European musical encounters and a northern working-class childhood. By centring her experiential empathy on a history of racism and poverty, she guides us into better ways of being. Intimate reflections are contrasted with geopolitical and environmental concerns as Schönmaier's fierce intelligence focuses on what is most essential in our lives. The arc of this collection offers a rejuvenating meditation on the meaning of loss and love, highlighted by the lyric beauty of the writing.
Download or read book Bitter in the Belly written by John Emil Vincent and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2021-11-15 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The past grabs back / what it lets us handle Bitter in the Belly reckons with suicide’s wreckage. After John Emil Vincent’s best friend descends into depression and hangs himself, fluency and acuity lose their lustre. Vincent sorts through and tries to arrange cosmologies, eloquence, narrative, insight, only to find fatal limitations. He tries to trick tragedy into revealing itself by means of costume, comedy, thought experiment, theatre of the absurd, and Punch and Judy. The poems progress steadily from the erotic and mythic to the lapidary and biblical, relentlessly constructing images, finding any way to bring the world into the light – what there is of light, when the light is on. In his most personal book, Vincent moves from stark innocence through awful events and losses, to something like acceptance without wisdom – Jonah spit back onto the sand with little to report but that he’s home.
Download or read book The Tantramar Re Vision written by Kevin Irie and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2021-08-04 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: I've lived the way a field is sometimes / a shelter for mice / or sometimes a source of game / for a hawk Inspired by the literary landscape of the late poet John Thompson, Kevin Irie's The Tantramar Re-Vision presents a portrait of nature where the benign and the bedevilled coexist, collude, or collide. The Tantramar Re-Vision charts routes of discovery as it follows trails, waterways, flights, and fears, be it through the woods, the wilds, the page, or the mind where "it's hard to admit / you are not to your taste." It questions an existence in which the inhuman thrives, ignorant of divinity, while the human psyche continues to search for answers as "life takes directions / away from" it. The Tantramar Marsh setting of John Thompson's Stilt Jack resonates with Irie's landscapes of birds, fish, plants, and wildlife, all still within reach yet part of a world where "wind carries sounds / it cannot hear." Insightful and meditative, The Tantramar Re-Vision is poetry of the inner self and the outside observer, a poetic testament to the ways literature creates its own landmarks and nature survives without knowing a word.
Download or read book Earth Words written by John Reibetanz and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2021-10-20 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The leaves of paper / butterfly-wing thin / let light stream through / only one side of each. If “poetry is what we do to break bread with the dead,” as Seamus Heaney put it, Earth Words breaks bread with three earlier writers through the glosa, a poetic form that unfolds as a dialogue. The collection inscribes a series of concentric circles, moving outwards from the eleventh-century world of Wang An-shih through the nineteenth century of Henry Thoreau and into the twentieth century with Emily Carr. Though the environmental and political problems of the twenty-first century feel unique, the figures in this book are met with similar challenges. Wang’s writings embody an ideal relationship between self and nature, preserving a sense of rootedness in times resembling the upheavals of the Trump era. This relationship is confirmed in conversations with Thoreau, whose closeness to nature provides an antidote to our age’s dependence on digital forms of communication. He also grapples with slavery and the failure to respect the full humanity of Indigenous peoples, struggles that ripple out into the present. Carr’s writings and art enter into Indigenous cultures and witness the enduring value of their way of looking at nature. She realizes that the impulse to creatively express one’s being runs through the entire natural world. Culminating in this realization, the concentric circles of Earth Words broaden out to include its twenty-first-century readers as well as its writers in a vision of creative growth.
Download or read book twofold written by Edward Carson and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2024-04-02 with total page 100 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The poet Charles Simic wrote, “Short poems: be brief and tell us everything.” Edward Carson’s extraordinary new work gathers concise diptych – or twofold – poems exploring themes of love, relationships, myth, art, language, math, physics, geometry, and artificial intelligence. Within the two sections of twofold, “dialogues” and “binaries,” the form of the diptych shapes language and meaning as paired poems engage each other across the margins of facing pages. Caroline Bem, author of A Moveable Form, writes: “The diptych, you see, is beautiful. It is symmetry and difference, doubling and mirroring, binarism and seriality. It is the form of paradox, both open and closed, free and contained.” Negotiating surprising twinning combinations, comparisons, and outcomes, the poems in twofold are lively, thought-provoking, and playful interchanges that are also mischievously literate, questioning, and intuitive.
Download or read book Full Moon of Afraid and Craving written by Melanie Power and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2022-04-15 with total page 109 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A hometown is a data centre / where the past is stored From a darkly humorous perspective, this book charts a young person’s navigation of narrow definitions of faith, femininity, and family. Confronting addiction, compulsions, and anxieties, Full Moon of Afraid and Craving explores the strange combination of wonder and longing that makes a life. Across settings rural and urban, Melanie Power’s poems commemorate ordinary moments and everyday characters: a roadside shopkeeper, a neighbourhood linden tree, a great-uncle’s hooch. Interrogating lineage and inheritance, she traces the unsettling shadows that border joy. A series of ambivalent odes pay a winking, Proustian homage to the sense memories of a Roman Catholic millennial upbringing in Newfoundland. The long poem “The Fever and the Fret,” written during pandemic lockdown in Montreal, considers how we re-examine and consolidate our personal and civic pasts in times of crisis, drawing timely parallels to John Keats’s confinement due to illness exactly two centuries prior. At times wry and lighthearted, at others elegiac and plaintive, the voices in these poems are controlled and confident. Just as the stars in the sky are best viewed at night, this collection embraces darkness to illuminate rays of moonlight.
Download or read book the swailing written by Patrick James Errington and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2023-03-15 with total page 107 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Here the long edge / of town Low / winter fog / ... My breath / my offering We are / our bodies burning Firmly rooted in fire-haunted landscapes that are at once psychological, emotional, and fiercely real, Patrick Errington’s first collection traces the brittle boundaries between presence and absence, keeping and killing, cruelty and tenderness. In these poems human voices whisper through the natural world – a hand turns on a lamp to extinguish the stars; stones outline a sleeping form; a black eye is a storm cloud. Errington stokes vivid images, formal grace, and subtle humour into the flickers of life that hold fast against unforgiving terrain. Here language functions like a controlled burn, one that could at any moment preserve, perfect, or reduce to ash. Urgent, resonant to the bone, the swailing burns to the ember-edge of grief, memory, and control to find the wildness, wilderness, and wonder that remain.
Download or read book Murmuration written by John Baglow and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2023-09-15 with total page 131 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: and it was in these bare sands / that you fell, / beloved. When John Baglow's partner Marianne MacKinnon died in 2006, he decided to assemble a new collection of poems in her memory. No one else knew of what proved to be a slow-moving ambition, but a member of the family mentioned one evening that Marianne had appeared in a dream, saying, “Tell John to finish my book.” After that, what choice did he have? In a famous photograph by James Crombie, a murmuration of starlings takes, for a magical moment, the shape of a giant bird. This is the metaphor that best describes the collection: individual poems moving together in liquid formation, arcing and swooping as they will, and for perhaps just a singular moment assuming the outline of the author, helplessly ever-changing. Some of these poems, inspired by love, grief, and wonder, have been tucked away for years; others are freshly written. All here find their place. There is no narrative in Murmuration, no chronology. Nor are the many personal remembrances and representations in the book confined to one person. Nevertheless, together they are one way of seeing, one way of being. Marianne would approve.
Download or read book act normal written by nancy viva davis halifax and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2023-09-15 with total page 106 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: i might never be no-one that shiny / the beauty of a sequin’d self / what was stitched into heaven’s drop The poems in act normal use illegibility and wilful uncertainty to evade the grasp of the normative, as endured by those institutionalized by, and through, the concept of normalcy. act normal starts in an institution where children categorized and constructed as intellectually inferior are placed into custodial care. These poems are inquisitive, articulating the entanglements of lives across categories of difference – particularly the lives of those who as children were considered to be other or less than human. Drawing upon conversations, archival materials, court cases, legislation, transcripts, and case histories, among other sources, nancy davis halifax’s poems destabilize categories of meaning – understanding disability and difference as “undecidability.” act normal is a movement of “feelingthought,” unsettling normative expectations and inviting readers to re-orient from the normative task of assuming the safety of consensual interpretation, while risking, cherishing, and performing non-indifference.
Download or read book unfinishing written by Brian Henderson and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2022-04-15 with total page 157 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: they come flying out from under your expectations / and once opened it is rain / and thinking a sandbar / always inventing a different script / never where you left it This dream book of kaleidoscopic, holographic, mutagenic poems is haunted by the loops, aporias, and entanglements of time – memory, forgetting, oblivion, fortune telling, eternal (or not) returns, timelessness (however that may manifest), beginnings and endings (if indeed there are such things), and other spectral speculations where the intimate and the outward might exchange places. With imagery both striking and nuanced, and language rich and strange, Brian Henderson encounters a hummingbird, a barred owl, a flood, a trapdoor, a table of contents, an empty rowboat, a nonexistent river, a room made of crystal, a heap of broken furniture, ecocatastrophe, and political debacle in mesmerizing poems that celebrate the strange and vertiginous musics of a kind of memory-ness invoked by the irretrievable. These poems ask how the future can exist in the now, the now in the past. What is a future? How might we recognize one? And although the now may be completely empty, what are the selves we seem to become? In the archeology of now, unfinishing asks who we might have been – and who we might yet be.
Download or read book Orchid Heart Elegies written by Zoë Landale and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2022-11-15 with total page 81 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Here we stand between one breath / and death asking to be light. What happens when someone we love dies? Orchid Heart Elegies explores the fragmentation of loss. In luminous poems that echo the Duino Elegies, Zoë Landale – like an edgy, modern-day Rilke – takes the reader to a place of amazement. Enquiring into loneliness and the transformative power of a particular bioregion, Landale’s poems use language infused with the consolations of music to enact transformation. Following in the tradition of thousands of years of lyrical poetry, they gently suggest that we can bear our lives, no matter the pain, by means of a sole moment’s solace. Capturing the torn, jagged moments of grief and transforming them into poems of deep consolation and healing, Orchid Heart Elegies will appeal to any reader who has lost someone dear to them.
Download or read book Unbound written by Gabrielle McIntire and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2021-07-15 with total page 82 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: inside sadness is glory / if you see it right way round, / find the seam, reverse it to perspectivize, / unwind light, joy's unravelling spool Inspired by mystical traditions, birdwatching, tree planting, ethics, neuropsychology, and quantum physics, Gabrielle McIntire's poems draw us in with their passionate attention to what it means to be human in a still-wondrous natural environment. Touching on human frailty, the eternal, and the ecological with a delicate and evocative brush, Unbound enacts an almost prayerful attentiveness to the earth's creatures and landscapes while it offers both mournful and humorous treatments of love and loss. McIntire's finely tuned musical voice – with its incantatory rhythms, rhymes, sound play, and entrancing double meanings – invites us to be courageously open to the unexpected. Unbound stirs us to re-evaluate our place amidst the astonishing beauty and wisdom of an Earth facing the early stages of climate change.
Download or read book The House You Were Born In written by Tanya Standish McIntyre and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2022-12-14 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: a keeper of things forgotten, a vase / for pictures made by words, a riverbed / for the stories you tell, an earthen silhouette / of a child With vivid imagery and endless compassion for her subjects, Tanya Standish McIntyre’s words breathe life. Her richly lyrical phrases capture both the fear and the beauty of growing up in a rural working-class community, anchored by the magical bond between a young girl and her grandfather. Way’s Mills, Quebec, is the setting for these poems, although as with Mark Twain’s Mississippi, physical place becomes a place in the heart in this elegy for lost ancestral farms. Standish McIntyre gives voice to the unspoken, shining a light into the dark corners of our collective memory to reveal an indelible past that gleams with clarity, empathy, and humanity. Taking seed in the dilapidated barns and warm sunlit rooms of Standish McIntyre’s personal history, these poems weave a filigree of well-worn remembrances and time-honoured treaties of the self, half forgotten yet ever lingering. Lucid, sharp, and crisp as spring water, this collection holds a sweeping narrative power that will stay with you long after the last line.
Download or read book New Songs for Orpheus written by John Reibetanz and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2023-02-28 with total page 134 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For a change Orpheus / listens to the other / musicians once the hum / of his lyre no longer / hangs like moss from branches / in the forest air In New Songs for OrpheusJohn Reibetanz updates Ovid’s poetry. Ovid’s words showed him to be a person of deep empathy for natural, animal, and human worlds, and so Reibetanz posits that the Roman writer would likely be eager to take account of all that we have learned about them in the past two thousand years. Ovid would be familiar with recent discoveries about the complex inner lives and societies of non-human animals, and about the intricate interrelationships sustained in forests. The poems in New Songs for Orpheus look at and listen to the real creatures into which Ovid’s characters were transformed, acts viewed not as punishment or deprivation, but as a release into other intriguing forms of life. In the human realm, he might find a suitably cataclysmic counterpart to the Trojan War in the barbarities and sacrifices of World War II, or perhaps see an analogue to the Fall of Troy in the fall of the Two Towers in September 2001. The songs Orpheus sings then transform into more contemporary shapes, as characters and incidents from the Canadian musical Come from Away – like those in Ovid’s “restored” world after the flood – are celebrated in a reaffirmation of community after the divisive horrors of 9/11. In all these times and places, metamorphosis brings new meaning into a life, be it human, plant, or animal.
Download or read book Vlarf written by Jason Camlot and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2021-11-15 with total page 106 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Holmes entered the cabinet / of the respectable reverend / (who was in fact a closet naturalist) / and found so many Victorian things. In the early 2000s flarf poetry emerged as an avant-garde movement that generated disturbing and amusing texts from the results of odd internet searches. In Vlarf Jason Camlot plumbs the canon of Victorian literature, as one would search the internet, to fashion strange, sad, and funny forms and feelings in poetry. Vlarf pursues expressions of sentiment that may have become unfamiliar, unacceptable, or uncool since the advent of modernism by mining Victorian texts and generic forms with odd inclinations, using techniques that include erasure, bout-rimé, emulation, adaptation, reboot, mimicry, abhorrence, cringe, and love. Erasures of massive volumes of prose by John Stuart Mill and John Ruskin become concise poems of condensed sadness; a reboot of Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market” is told from the perspective of a ten-year-old boy with an imaginary albatross pal; recovered fragments from an apocryphal book of Victorian nonsense verse are pieced together; a Leonard Cohen song about Queen Victoria is offered in a steampunk rendering; and a meditative guinea pig delivers a dramatic monologue in the vein of Robert Browning. Camlot moves through Victorian literature as a collector in a curiosity shop, seeking the oddest forms of feeling in language to shape them into peculiarly affective poems.
Download or read book Unbecoming written by Neil Surkan and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2021-11-15 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Subtler, subtler, beat our hearts / down aisles of cluttered glitz. Unbecoming, Neil Surkan's sophomore collection, clings to hope while the world deteriorates, transforms, and grows less hospitable from moment to moment. Interplaying tenderness with dogged perseverance, these poems tumble through vignettes of degraded landscapes, ebbing spiritual communities, faltering men, and precarious friendships. Yet, in the face of such despair, responsibility and optimism bolster one another – exuberance, amazement, and compassion persist despite the worsening of the wounded Earth. Multifaceted and inventive, this collection of poems vaults from intimation to excoriation, where grief, desire, bewilderment, and protest all crackle and meld. As the world "appears, exceeds, and un- / becomes too quickly for certainty, / just enough for love," the poems in Unbecoming face the horizon with wary eyes and refuse to turn away.