Download or read book Miskwagoode written by Annharte and published by New Star Books. This book was released on 2022-03-17 with total page 80 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Taken from the Anishinaabe word for woman, MISKWAGOODE is a lyrical portrayal of unreconciled Indigenous experience under colonialism, past and present. Miskwagoode, the woman in the red dress, is Annharte, and she is Annharte's mother, who disappeared when the poet was a girl.Miskwagoodeis Annharte's new book about her mother loss, her mothermiss, about all the women buried in common enough / cross-generational graves. Marked with her characteristic sharp eye and humour, and hard earned wisdom about the ominous progress ahead, Annharte's fifth collection encompasses the poet's experiences as an Anishinaabe Elder, witness not survivor, writing of the weight of a present and persisting colonialism. In her sly, cheeky riffs on life behind the buckskin curtain at the margins of settler society, Annharte tells us about granny circles, the horny old guys, and getting your hair done. But these poems about rez life and the community and belonging it offers are set against the background radiation of the poverty and the sicknesses, despair, violence, sexism, and sexual abuse, the legacies of unequal relations. Miskwagoodeconcludes with Wabang, a suite of short poems comprising Annharte's own thumbnail transcontinental Indigenous mythology. Poetry. Native American Studies. Women's Studies.
Download or read book A Voice Great Within Us written by Charles Lillard and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Skookum, cultus, hyack, saltchuck, klahowya, tillicum: It is in words like these that the last vestiges of a lost British Columbian language remain. It was known as Chinook. Its use today is mainly confined to colloquialisms, and place names like Boston Bar, Canim Lake, Illahee Mountain, Snass Creek, and Skookumchuck. It began as a trading jargon, but it soon evolved into a distinct West Coast tongue. Down through the years, as many as a quarter of a million people relied on it. Chinook was an everyday necessity.A Voice Great Within Us consists of an introductory essay by Glavin exploring the development and spread of Chinook throughout the West Coast, and the place it continues to have in our history; the Chinook poem, Rain Language; Lillard's own essay on the part that Chinook played in his own life and exploration of British Columbia. In addition, A Voice Great Within Us includes a lexicon containing hundreds of Chinook words and expressions and a map and gazetteer of British Columbia, showing eighty Chinook place names in this province.A Voice Great Within Us is Number 7 in the Transmontanus series of books edited by Terry Glavin.
Download or read book Indigena Awry written by Annharte and published by New Star Books. This book was released on 2012-11-30 with total page 137 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NDN word warrior Marie Annharte Baker's fourth book of poems, Indigena Awry, is her largest and wildest yet. It collects a decade's worth of verse — fifty-nine poems. Set noticeably in Winnipeg and Vancouver, but in many other places on either side of the Medicine Line as well, the poems are a laser-eyed meander through contested streets filled with racism, classism, and sexism. Shot through with sex and violence and struggle and sadness and trauma, her work is always set to detect and confront the delusions of colonialism and its discontents. These poems are informed by a sceptical spirituality. They call for justice for NDNs through the Permanent Resistance that goes around in cities. This is bruising and exacting stuff, but Annharte is also one of poetry's best jokers. In Indigena Awry, you can find fictitious girl gangs coexisting with real boy ones. NDN grannies may be found flirting salaciously in some internet chat room. One might use duct tape to prevent a war. You might be worried that hand-signalling for a Timbit on an airplane flight will be considered a terrorist act. Annharte may be seam-walking a singular path but she is not without allies. In the United States, they could include Leslie Marmon Silko and Chrystos. In Canada, Beth Brant and Gerry Gilbert. The jazz inflections of Beat writing are often apparent in her work. She swings from a poetic madness into a mad poetics. Way under it all, acting as a deep sort of platform, could be considered the Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong'o's project of decolonizing one's mind. Both sketch out an argument that we will not see, feel, or respond correctly in or to our own lives without doing this, because otherwise we will be living within a philosophical myopia generated by a bad fiction. While Indigena Awry is written for NDN persons, it is highly recommended for truth-seekers of every nature and anarchs of word and spirit. In an Annharte poem you might lose your way only to find what's important.
Download or read book Gardens Aflame written by Maleea Acker and published by New Star Books. This book was released on 2012 with total page 109 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Accustomed to the dark, dripping stands of Douglas–fir, spruce and hemlock that blanketed the Hudson's Bay Company outposts on the remote western coast of the "new World" the first Europeans were surely startled to see the wide–open landscapes of the Garry oak meadows they encountered on Southern Vancouver Island ––– landscapes that might have reminded any explorers who had ventured into the African savannahs of what they had seen there. Though slow in comprehending what they had stumbled upon, the Europeans immediately recognized the deep, rich deposits of black soil that extended many feet below the surface, and James Douglas chose the site as the ideal location for the HBC's new fort, and settlement. What the newcomers failed to appreciate is that these meadows were not the work of nature alone, but of the Coast Salish peoples who had been living in these parts for millennia. With the construction of the fort of Victoria began an encroachment on these Garry oak meadows, built up over centuries if not millennia, a process that continues today. In Gardens Aflame, Victoria writer and environmentalist Maleea Acker tells us about this unique and vanishing ecosystem, and the people who have made it their life's work to save the Garry oak and the environment ––– including the human environment ––– it depends on. Acker tells us about the Garry oak species and its unique habits and requirements, including its unusual summer dormancy period, when all the surrounding plants are coursing with life. We learn something about the scientists, arborists, and Garry oak–loving volunteers who have dedicated themselves to this tree; and about Theophrastus, Humboldt, and their other forebearers who are still reshaping our notions of nature and humans' place in it. And in the course of Acker's story, we see her fall under the spell of the strange beauty woven by these magnificent trees, and the ecosystems they tower over ––– until, in the final act, she decides to turn her own front yard into her own version of a Garry oak meadow, defying City Hall and the neighbours, and bringing to a head in 2011 all the issues raised 150 years ago when Europeans first saw the open meadows of Southern Vancouver Island. Gardens Aflame is number 21 in the Transmontanus series.
Download or read book Words Words Words written by George Bowering and published by New Star Books. This book was released on 2012-10-25 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Words, Words, Words is a wide–ranging collection of literary essays that astonish the reader with their candor, insight, and generosity. Many of them reveal the absurdity that so often underlies our most passionate thoughts, our most cherished moments, even our most disturbing fears and recognitions. They echo everywhere with a kind of cosmic laughter that never lets us forget we are constructs of our own capacity to see through language — that at a most fundamental level, what we think about our selves is inevitably an extension of what we learn in our reading of others. Here we also get to find out what Bowering most cherishes about writers and writing: who Al Purdy was; what David McFadden's work pays attention to; when the world of poetry changed; where Artie Gold appeared as a light fixture in our darkness; how bpNichol's Martyrology legitimized the vernacular; why we cannot read history without encountering Shakespeare. Neither precious nor shy, their subjects range from the sublime to the ridiculous — from the inarticulate nature of grief to a modest proposal for the uses of the dead. Together, they constitute a history of the education of Canada's first Poet Laureate: from his adolescent dreams of becoming a writer; his early recognition of the discipline required to forge a life in language; the ongoing feud between the TISH authors and the self–appointed nationalist police; Bowering shares with us what he has learned in a lifetime of exercising his craft — even including what constitutes bad writing. Whether in deconstructing the cliches of genre fiction; the ghetto of identity politics; the hapless failure of any attempt to harness language to utilitarian purposes; the abuse of language required to write "sensitive" prose and verse; he constantly reminds us that the first and most important rule of life is: pay attention.
Download or read book Stranger on a Strange Island written by Grant Buday and published by New Star Books. This book was released on 2011-05-16 with total page 81 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Vancouver, $600 a month gets you half a bachelor suite. On Mayne Island, it gets you a three–bedroom house overlooking the waters of Active Pass, with varied wildlife and lush trees as neighbours. With that in mind, Grant Buday trades in the high–powered city life in Vancouver for the small town eccentricities of Mayne Island. The scenery, however impressive, is not the only change. A college English instructor for six years, Buday now finds himself working wherever a hand is needed. Some of his more adventurous jobs included stealing a boat with one of the locals, who in exchange asked Buday for a word of the day; sheep herding on a deer farm with no deer; and his current part–time gig, helping out at the Mayne Island Recycling Depot. Living on Mayne has also presented Buday with endless opportunities for learning, whether it's firewood–picking lessons from his tree–felling Mennonite neighbour Jake, or chainsaw lingo lessons from the local dealer in Sidney. In Stranger on a Strange Island, Buday explores the layered nature of small–town life, the rich history of Mayne Island and the reasons that compelled him to trade in city life for the island life. Stranger On a Strange Island is number 19 in the Transmontanus series.
Download or read book Exercises in Lip Pointing written by Marie Annharte Baker and published by Transmontanus. This book was released on 2003 with total page 100 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Exercises in Lip Pointing is a new collection of poems by respected First Nations writer Annharte. She uses oral sounds and written signs to probe and prod the reader, to ask the right questions, to lay bare the contradictions and delights in the serendipities of her experience. She makes us laugh, cry, and learn."--Publisher.
Download or read book Burning Water written by George Bowering and published by New Star Books. This book was released on 2007-11-20 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1980 to high acclaim, Burning Water won a Governor General's Award for fiction that year. A rollicking chronicle of Captain Vancouver's search for the Northwest Passage, the book has over its career been mentioned in recommended lists of postmodern fiction, BC historical fiction, gay fiction and humour. This gives you some idea of the scope of what has been called Bowering's best novel. "I have sometimes said, kidding but not really kidding," writes its author, "that I attended to the spirit of the west coast, and told the story about the rivals for our land as an instance in which the commanders decided to make love, not war." As an accurate account of Vancouver's exploration of our coastline, Burning Water conveys the exact length 99 feet of the explorer's ship, and contains citations from his journals. As a work of fanciful fiction, things usually thought to be impossible transpire, without compromising the realism of the text. Bowering recalls that his free hand with history particularly incensed the founder of the National Archives, who had written a biography of George Vancouver and complained in print that Burning Water differed too much from other, similar books in its field.
Download or read book Debbie written by Lisa Robertson and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 104 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poetry. One of the more remarkable books of poetry to appear in a long time, Lisa Robertson's DEBBIE: AN EPIC was a finalist for the 1998 Governor General's Award for Poetry. As arresting as the cover image, Robertson's strong, confident voice echoes a wide range of influences from Virgil to Edith Sitwell, yet remains unique and utterly unmistakable for that of any other writer. Brainy, witty, sensual, demonstrating a commanding grasp of language and rhetoric, DEBBIE: AN EPIC is nevertheless inviting and easy to read, even fun. Its eponymous heroine will annihilate your preconceptions about poetry - and about the name "Debbie
Download or read book Kokanee written by Don Gayton and published by Transmontanus. This book was released on 2002 with total page 100 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Kootenays a region of rivers, lakes and mountains in southeastern British Columbia is home to the kokanee. This landlocked sibling of the sockeye salmon is an extravagant gift from the Pacific Ocean, an elusive flash of molten silver, a lustful reproductive torrent of fire-engine red, a marvel of interior adaptation, an icon of regional culture, and a pawn of industry. In Kokanee: The Redfish and the Kootenay Bioregion, writer and ecologist Don Gayton tells the kokanee's story, from the cataclysmic Ice Age events that gave birth to the species through its heyday as a sporting fish, to current threats to its existence. The story of the kokanee is the story of the delicate balance between land and water, and between people and nature. Kokanee: The Redfish and the Kootenay Bioregion is Number 9 in the Transmontanus series of books edited by Terry Glavin.
Download or read book Vancouver written by George Stanley and published by New Star Books. This book was released on 2008-04-20 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Lions bare of snow, crowded express buses, a giant red turning letter W. Vancouver: A Poem is George Stanley's vision of the city where he lives, though he does not call it his own. Vancouver, the city, becomes Stanley's palimpsest: an overwritten manuscript on which the words of others are still faintly visible. Here the Food Floor's canned exotica, here the stores of Chinatown, here the Cobalt Hotel brimful of cheap beer and indifferent women. The poet travels through the urban landscape on foot and by public transit, observing the multifarious life around him, noting the at times abrupt changes in the built environment, and vestiges of its brief history. As he records his perceptions, the city enters his consciousness in unforeseen ways, imposing its categories and language. Skirting chestnuts on the sidewalk or reading William Carlos Williams's "Paterson" on the Granville Bridge, the poet travels along the inlet, past the mountains, under the trees, interrogating the local world with his words.
Download or read book IKMQ written by Roger Farr and published by New Star Books. This book was released on 2012-07-26 with total page 89 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Roger Farr's IKMQ consists of sixty–four brief passages – stories, descriptions, instructions, scenarios, formulae – each involving the characters represented by the letters I, K, M and Q. Various clues, suggested by the rules of grammar and syntax, hint at connections and continuities, and at narrative peaking out from behind the screen of action. But never mind the theory – enjoy the ride, as I, K, M and Q convert houses to commercial grow–ops, manufacture explosives, go all in on the flop, get up early to catch chinook, plan, build and sell subdivisions, conduct meetings according to Roberts, plot a prison break, score an all–important goal, get the door for the pizza delivery boy, and get on with transforming the world through their revolutionary action.
Download or read book High Slack written by Judith Williams and published by . This book was released on 1996 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the winter of 1861, Robert Homfray made a perilous journey up Bute Inlet to begin surveying for Alfred Waddington's 'gold road', which was to link British Columbia's coast with the Cariboo. It was hoped that the road would open up the territory to gold prospectors and homesteaders; instead, it dead-ended just above Homathko Canyon with the massacre of the road crew sent to build it. The colonial government called it murder; the Tsilhqot'in people called it war.More than a century later, Judith Williams retraces Homfray's journey. By juxtaposing her impressions with the written and oral histories of the event, she peels back some of the many layers of 'truth' to reveal what is both a stirring tale and an engrossing glimpse of life in the Chilcotin over 130 years ago.High Slack is Number 4 in the Transmontanus series edited by Terry Glavin.
Download or read book Writing Class written by Michael Barnholden and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the mid 1980s, the Kootenay School of Writing, a writer-run center in Vancouver, has been the site of some of the most innovative poetry coming out of North America. Leaving behind conventional ideas about syntax and lyricism, the KSW poets have produced a body of work that is jarring, troubling, provocative, funny, and beautiful. In their introduction to this sampling from the work of fourteen writers, Andrew Klobucar and Michael Barnholden describe the historical and aesthetic environment which produced the Kootenay School of Writing, and in doing so demystify a poetry that many regard as "difficult." WRITING CLASS is a fascinating introduction to the most vital poetry being written today.
Download or read book The Woman in the Trees written by Gerry William and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A magical landscape as close as your own backyard, populated by the spirits of the animals and people, The Woman in the trees is a mythical exploration of the first contact between the Okanagans (the syilx) and early settlers, between orchardists and ranchers, between dream time and real time."--Page [4] of cover.
Download or read book Hammertown written by Peter Culley and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 87 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With Hammertown, Peter Culley establishes himself as a stylistic virtuoso utilizing a startlingly broad range of reference to result in a body of work at once intimate and prophetic. It is above all a portrait of a town. Caught by a passing reference in George Perec's Life: A User's Manual to a "village on Vancouver Island," Culley began to re-imagine his hometown of Nanaimo, not as it is, but as it might be imagined in the mind of a Parisian who had rarely left his city. The poems that make up Hammertown move through realms both linguistic and geographic, in which intersecting Old and New worlds, history, music and science change everyday life with both painful resonance and exotic rapture.
Download or read book The World I Guess written by George Bowering and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poetry. George Bowering's 36th book of poetry, THE WORLD, I GUESS shows Canada's original poet-laureate still in MVP form as he approaches his 80th birthday. THE WORLD, I GUESS is a substantial book, six sections that demonstrate a command of a broad poetic range, a catholic range of interests, and echoes of a lifetime of reading and learning from Pound, Williams, Stanley, and others. The centrepiece of Bowering's new book is a long poem, "The Flood," a complex, discursive poem whose subject is poesis and whose interest is in the world around the writer. But the book ends with a suite of translations of the "modern" Canadian poetry canon, from Charles G.D. Roberts and Archibald Lampman to Irving Layton and Phyllis Webb. While THE WORLD, I GUESS might be just Bowering's 36th book of poetry, he's also issued a dozen or two novels and short story collections and another couple of dozen books of stuff he didn't make up: criticism, memoirs, and histories.
