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Book Vlarf

    Book Details:
  • Author : Jason Camlot
  • Publisher : McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
  • Release : 2021-11-15
  • ISBN : 0228009286
  • Pages : pages

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 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.

Book Water Quality

    Book Details:
  • Author : Cynthia Woodman Kerkham
  • Publisher : McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
  • Release : 2024-09-15
  • ISBN : 0228023459
  • Pages : 118 pages

Download or read book Water Quality written by Cynthia Woodman Kerkham and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2024-09-15 with total page 118 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: I find my bearings by clouds of moon jellies / afloat beneath my anchored boat, / pulsing the sea’s bright night, / their milky way, unfurling. In these lush and vivid poems water gloves a swimmer’s body, is “satin, yes, viscous. Albumen, vernix, newborn slick.” It “rinses gai lan – bright green in a silver bowl” in Hong Kong or hibernates in the Pacific Northwest “under a silky pelt / of rain. People-less. Days, months of this / hiss, softness breaking cliffs.” Cynthia Woodman Kerkham ponders the urgent question, What does water want? Whether as the body of a beloved lake, where people wrestle with the concerns of stewardship, or as the sea in which to sail and drift, or as a gene pool simmering through a family’s veins, water is the main character here. It can be turbid, the amniotic colour of spittle, or, in a time of drought, “brilliant beads.” As “a stream flushed over granite,” water seems to want “so little it shares another’s colour,” yet here, it gets our full and necessary attention. Rich with vibrant language and intensity, these poems sizzle in lyric form, monologues, elegy, and haibun. Water Quality calls on us to consider that our very survival is at stake unless we make a vow to this vital element to cherish it as we would a partner.

Book Unbecoming

    Book Details:
  • Author : Neil Surkan
  • Publisher : McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
  • Release : 2021-11-15
  • ISBN : 0228010241
  • Pages : 136 pages

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.

Book Whiny Baby

    Book Details:
  • Author : Julie Paul
  • Publisher : McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
  • Release : 2024-04-15
  • ISBN : 022802076X
  • Pages : 130 pages

Download or read book Whiny Baby written by Julie Paul and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2024-04-15 with total page 130 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chomping / champing / championing / churlish / ... / There’s a wolf at the door / that looks exactly like me Who is the “whiny baby” in this book? Rather than calling names or hurling insults, the candid poems in this collection most often implicate the poet herself. Expansive in form and voice, the poems in Julie Paul’s second collection offer both love letters and laments. They take us to construction sites, meadows, waiting rooms, beaches, alleys, gardens, and frozen rivers, from Montreal to Hornby Island. They ask us to live in the moment, despite the moment. Including a spirited long poem that riffs on the fairy tale “Three Billy Goats Gruff,” these poems are like old friends that at once console and confess. They blow kisses, they remember, and they celebrate the broken and the lost alongside the beautiful. At turns frank, peevish, introspective, and mischievous, the poems share sincere and intimate perspectives on the changing female body, our natural and built landscapes, and the idiosyncrasies of modern life. Whiny Baby calls on us to simultaneously examine and exult in our brief time on earth.

Book Without Beginning or End

    Book Details:
  • Author : Jacqueline Bourque
  • Publisher : McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
  • Release : 2024-09-15
  • ISBN : 0228022630
  • Pages : 76 pages

Download or read book Without Beginning or End written by Jacqueline Bourque and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2024-09-15 with total page 76 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In my palliative months / the cormorant leaves me / at peace, disintegrating / with the exhalation of a Buddha Without Beginning or End is Jacqueline Bourque’s final testament to a life well lived, written in the wake of a terminal cancer diagnosis. Deeply inspired by her Acadian upbringing along the ocean shores of New Brunswick, these are poems populated by aerialists, painters, and the spirit of Charles Baudelaire, who connects the poet to “the ligatures of life.” Those ligatures in turn connect her with family in the collection’s remarkable title suite, bringing new life to a past that continues to resonate in the present. Without Beginning or End is a book about love, friendship, art, and the human condition. Beautiful, and poignantly human, it is an emotionally charged parting gift to loved ones and readers alike.

Book twofold

    Book Details:
  • Author : Edward Carson
  • Publisher : McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
  • Release : 2024-04-02
  • ISBN : 0228020115
  • Pages : 100 pages

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.

Book Full Moon of Afraid and Craving

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.

Book the swailing

    Book Details:
  • Author : Patrick James Errington
  • Publisher : McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
  • Release : 2023-03-15
  • ISBN : 0228017882
  • Pages : 107 pages

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.

Book Murmuration

    Book Details:
  • Author : John Baglow
  • Publisher : McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
  • Release : 2023-09-15
  • ISBN : 0228018501
  • Pages : 131 pages

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.

Book act normal

    Book Details:
  • Author : nancy viva davis halifax
  • Publisher : McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
  • Release : 2023-09-15
  • ISBN : 0228019486
  • Pages : 106 pages

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.

Book unfinishing

    Book Details:
  • Author : Brian Henderson
  • Publisher : McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
  • Release : 2022-04-15
  • ISBN : 0228012929
  • Pages : 157 pages

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.

Book Orchid Heart Elegies

    Book Details:
  • Author : Zoë Landale
  • Publisher : McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
  • Release : 2022-11-15
  • ISBN : 0228015456
  • Pages : 81 pages

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.

Book Metromorphoses

    Book Details:
  • Author : John Reibetanz
  • Publisher : McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
  • Release : 2024-05-21
  • ISBN : 022802093X
  • Pages : 119 pages

Download or read book Metromorphoses written by John Reibetanz and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2024-05-21 with total page 119 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When he first hiked the Don Valley trails / all he heard was river as he strode / beside its glitter of smashing glass Grounded in the local and immediate – from Toronto’s rivers and ravines to its highways and skyscrapers – Metromorphoses explores some of the radical changes that have taken place in the city during the course of its history. The collection’s poems focus, in roughly chronological order, on the city’s inhabitants and the changing relationships between people and place, from the original Indigenous presence, through the immigrants of the nineteenth century and the Depression and war survivors of the twentieth century, to the twenty-first century’s setbacks and affirmations. We encounter characters such as Symphony Pete, who whistled classical music while hiking Don Valley trails, Henry “Box” Brown, who escaped from southern slavery in a packing crate, or the exhausted anonymous newsboy a photographer caught fast asleep next to his stack of newspapers on a flight of stone steps. We zoom in like time-lapse photography on the changes that a single site has experienced, from wood-frame cottages to foundry to synagogue to furniture store to parking lot to the new provincial courthouse. These poems bring the reader closer to the impulses that drove the art of the Mississaugas, the escape from slavery or famine of new settlers, or the social awareness of a Dr Charles Hastings or a Raymond Moriyama. Far from Eliot’s “unreal city,” Metromorphoses takes us into the heart of the real Toronto, alive and ever-changing.

Book Bridestones

    Book Details:
  • Author : Miranda Pearson
  • Publisher : McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
  • Release : 2024-04-02
  • ISBN : 0228020794
  • Pages : 107 pages

Download or read book Bridestones written by Miranda Pearson and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2024-04-02 with total page 107 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Come, anguish. Help us manage / the plainsong of an open shore, / its language of high tide rich and close, / close and hard to see. The early elegiac poems in Bridestones emerge from the borderlands between life and death, loss and renewal. Drawing on dreams, opera, and visual art, and employing symbolist and playfully surreal imagery, Miranda Pearson questions the ways we tend and grieve – for each other and our environment. Beginning with a sudden bereavement, the first section ends with a long poem, “Clearance,” that depicts the experience of emptying and departing a home – the physicality of a house serving as a vehicle for processing grief. Pearson writes on family trauma, illness, love, and desire with a pervading sense of hauntedness, compressed, lyrical accounts of complex and ambivalent terrain. The impact of a pandemic lurks in the background, and themes of fear run through much of this collection, with poems exploring how we face our fears – or deny and avoid them – and, ultimately, how we grow and adapt. Through meditations on art, myth, archaeology, ceremony, and death, Pearson reveals the veil between life and death when drawn to its thinnest. Like the hovering falcon depicted in “A Song of Roses,” the poems view the world from above: “if earth is body, and sky – God help us, spirit.”

Book Bitter in the Belly

    Book Details:
  • Author : John Emil Vincent
  • Publisher : McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
  • Release : 2021-11-15
  • ISBN : 0228010322
  • Pages : 158 pages

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 158 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.

Book The House You Were Born In

    Book Details:
  • Author : Tanya Standish McIntyre
  • Publisher : McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
  • Release : 2022-12-14
  • ISBN : 0228015790
  • Pages : 180 pages

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.