Download or read book A Lovely Gutting written by Robin Durnford and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2012 with total page 100 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Salvaging beauty from grief's wreckage in the towns and wilds of post-cod Newfoundland.

Download or read book hook written by nancy viva davis halifax and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2015-07-01 with total page 95 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: See her? / Steadfast and firm her / branches graze the mantle of quiet clouds / as she elaborates her claim Haunted by indifference toward systemic violences and the disregard endured by those people labelled as "problems," nancy viva davis halifax’s poems articulate the constraints of discredited lives. Conveying her experiences witnessing homelessness, poverty, disability, and chronic illness on the streets and within women's emergency shelters, davis halifax orients readers to recognize ongoing suffering in our society. One poem, a purl of four words, reminds the reader that language entangles and unbinds lives, and that life is an unfastening, a knitting by which some are lost and others made separable. These are unregulated poems, poems that refuse indifference and reassert mutuality. They are not an argument, they are not assured, not facts, not a problem, not a resource, but an opening.

Download or read book A House in Memory written by David Helwig and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2020-07-23 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "the language of the waterway / the name / the train's route through bliss / to" When the poet and novelist David Helwig - a recipient of the Matt Cohen Prize for lifetime achievement and a member of the Order of Canada - died in October 2018, he left behind a substantial catalogue of unpublished work. A House in Memory, a selection of Helwig's last poems, was assembled by his daughter, Maggie. It shows an author still at the height of his powers, creating work in complex formal structures, contemplating mortality, memory, and the landscape of his adopted home of Prince Edward Island, and paying tribute to his literary predecessors. The collection also includes unpublished poems from earlier in Helwig's career. Ranging widely through time, space, and literary tradition, A House in Memory features some deeply personal poems. As Maggie Helwig says of her father, "he could not cease to be a poet as long as he had breath in this world.

Download or read book Slow War written by Benjamin Hertwig and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2017-08-14 with total page 135 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Benjamin Hertwig's debut collection of poetry, Slow War, is at once an account of contemporary warfare and a personal journey of loss and the search for healing. It stands in the tradition of Wilfred Owen's "Dulce et Decorum Est" and Kevin Powers’s "Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting." A century after the First World War, Hertwig presents both the personal cost of war in poems such as "Somewhere in Flanders/Afghanistan" and "Food Habits of Coyotes, as Determined by Examination of Stomach Contents," and the potential for healing in unlikely places in "A Poem Is Not Guantánamo Bay." This collection provides no easy answers – Hertwig looks at the war in Afghanistan with the unflinching gaze of a soldier and the sustained attention of a poet. In his accounting of warfare and its difficult aftermath on the homefront, the personal becomes political. While these poems inhabit both experimental and traditional forms, the breakdown of language channels a descent into violence and an ascent into a future that no longer feels certain, where history and trauma are forever intertwined. Hertwig reminds us that remembering war is a political act and that writing about war is a way we remember.

Download or read book whereabouts written by Edward Carson and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2021-08-02 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: in the poem / of the world / there once / was a map / of the map / composed in / the likeness / of a poem In this riddling and seeking book of poems, Edward Carson navigates the emotional, often contradictory intelligence of the heart and mind. In three interrelated segments, whereabouts powerfully charts the tight emotional spaces between thinking and language, beauty and perception, love and the polemics of self and other. Taking on cartographic distortions and dynamics of the map metaphor, "thereabouts (or the mapmaker's dilemma)" playfully confronts the quandaries of personal navigation when the wants and needs of the esemplastic mind are forever devising new places to be. Exploring the brain, its neurons, and serpentine synaptic connections, "hereabouts (in fourteen scans)" advances a poetry of rhizomic communication capturing networks of thought and feeling that spring from both conflict and caress. Within a relationship's countless masquerades and revelations, "whereabouts (the lovers' discourse)" invites the reader to eavesdrop on a series of intimate conversations wherein lovers argue and act out their richly populated inner lives, addressing issues of gender, pleasure, communication, control, and sex.

Download or read book Grotesque Tenderness written by Daniel Cowper and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2019-05-15 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Afraid to be alone / we met by lamplight, trading stories: // Sin of Man was one, // Age of Science, another. More // prayers than answers. Daniel Cowper's debut poetry collection, Grotesque Tenderness, speaks for an unrooted age, for unrooted people. In these poems, city-dwellers long to ally themselves with some sympathetic culture or the evolutionary logic of nature, but those alliances remain conditional, ambiguous, or dangerous. A tsunami smashes a harbour city into “tide-rows of burning debris”; children chase snakes in summer meadows. The primordial past spins off “rogue by-products and flawed replicas,” while lonely office workers get high on back porches and drink themselves to sleep. The musical and kinetic energy of Grotesque Tenderness is driven by our urge to understand pain and our hunger to reach an imperfect reconciliation with the problems of guilt and suffering. But in the tradition of William Blake, these poems affirm again and again that “the lit / world goes on living” and life justifies itself through its own workings. From elegant lyrics of alienation and heartbreak to long-form mythopoeia and lament, these poems approach beauty, ugliness, even criminality in a spirit of wonder and vulnerability.

Download or read book Side Effects May Include Strangers written by Dominik Parisien and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2020-10-22 with total page 91 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ask, Can we for a moment make of beauty / the measure of our pain? and I will answer. To be ill is to be a body bursting with strangers. A curiosity. A narrative to interpret. Dominik Parisien's debut collection is a poignant celebration of the complicated lived experience of disability, a challenge to the societal gaze, and a bold reconfiguration of the language of pain. A powerful contribution to the field of disability poetics, Side Effects May Include Strangers is an affecting look at the multitude of ways a body is both boundary and boundless. Parisien takes bpNichol's claim that "what is a poem is inside of your body" and localizes the inner and outer lives of disabled, queer, and aging bodies as points of meaning for issues of autonomy, disability, sexuality, and language. Balancing hope and uncertainty, anger and gratitude, these poems shift from medical practice to myth, from trauma to intergenerational friendship, in an unflinching exploration of the beauty and complexity of othered bodies.

Download or read book Trio written by Sarah Tolmie and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2015-02-01 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Walk away before you are threadbare / Preserve your strength, preserve your curly hair / For others' use. Least I can do. / Let your fabric relax, snap back to mold / Another body and reveal its gold. A collection of 120 sonnets in eight parts, Trio reveals, frame by frame, a married fortysomething female narrator in love with two younger men - an intellectual and a dancer - and torn between the claims of body and mind. In the tradition of Renaissance sonnet sequences from Petrarch onward, the narrator's love objects are constantly before her eyes, and thus before ours, creating compassion, comedy, and desire. They are real and imaginary, opposite and complementary, present and unavailable, autonomous and dependent. Tolmie’s characters circle and shadow one another in every dance, spinning until fantasy becomes flesh and entanglement. In immortalizing the beloved, she draws on the power of both poetic and human reproduction. Like the contact improvisation modern dance form that influences the collection, these poems are both expressive and analytical. Through a singular feminist revision of a traditional poetic form, they tell the story - sometimes raunchy, sometimes crushingly sad - of a strong protagonist and the predicament she's in.

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 Outside Inside written by Michael Penny and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2014-02-13 with total page 103 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "My best actions are a parrot's / bright feathers in the dark jungle / trying to catch your eye / with the colour and flight / which says, I am here / and trying to do what’s right." Do we make the universe, or does it make us? In Outside, Inside, Michael Penny positions each of us at the centre of this mystery, but lightens this presumption with irony and word-play that is as entertaining as it is thought-provoking. The three hundred short, linked poems in this collection begin with a complaint about the unknowability of what's outside and what's inside, but then shift to an engagement with the very nature of this outside/inside dichotomy. Penny then explores the many ways the question arises for us: through travel, wind, rain, signs, ladders, landscape, the sun, the moon, even parrot feathers, and, of course, in how we use words and find meaning in them. Ultimately, the poems ask whether we construct what's outside, or whether what's outside constructs us.

Download or read book A Different Wolf written by Deborah-Anne Tunney and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2020-06-02 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In her debut poetry collection, Deborah-Anne Tunney delves into the life and work of one of the twentieth century's most influential film directors, Alfred Hitchcock. Just as Hitchcock's work looks unflinchingly at some of the darkest elements of human nature, A Different Wolf turns a lens on the director himself, revealing the interplay between the social mores of his time and Hitchcock's distinctive psychological makeup. A Different Wolf views the iconic director's cinematic masterpieces through the optics of the poet's personal quest for meaning. Tunney reveals how guilt and innocence, universal and timeless subjects, work to define character and motivate plot. Other poems illustrate Hitchcock's presentation of women as a sign of his fixations, but also as a product of his era. His desire to expose the qualities of time - how film can slow it down or speed it up, qualities he considered filmmaking's most important tool - points to the deep resonance of his work. Providing a sharp-eyed analysis of Hitchcock's life and art, A Different Wolf offers a unique take on the filmmaker's enduring relevance.

Download or read book rushes from the river disappointment written by stephanie roberts and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2020-07-02 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "those of us who've seen miracles know how to ask. / if you've asked, do you love me, i almost certainly / don't love you." This meditative, musically attentive collection explores the confounding nature of intimate relationships. stephanie roberts's poetic expression is often irreverent, unapologetic, and infused with humour that can take surprisingly grave turns. rushes from the river disappointment traverses city, country, and fantasy using nature as artery through the emotional landscape. As they wrestle to come to terms with the effects of uncertainty and grief on hope and belief, these diverse field notes are interspersed with the fabulous: a polar bear and owl engage in flirtation, a time traveller appears on a lake, an erotic scene takes place on a train, and we confront "people capable of eating popcorn at the movie of your agony." roberts's language is dense with images and sometimes acrobatic. In poems that affirm love and desire as treasures fought for more than just felt, rushes from the river disappointment turns an unblinking gaze on the failures of courage that distance us from love.

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 165 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.

Download or read book Look Here Look Away Look Again written by Edward Carson and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2019-04-09 with total page 134 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: an orientation of thought in thinking how a / thought begins and then travels on to arrive / at another place connected and like-minded // A work of art is never entirely present in itself but rather is always at large in the mind of the viewer. So it is that a painting needs to know the simplest question those viewing it are asking themselves. From the intimate starting point of observer and observed, Carson's seductive, exhilarating new collection turns poetry and paintings, making and representation, language and thought on their heads.

Download or read book Dust Blown Side of the Journey written by Eleonore Schönmaier and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2017-04-11 with total page 137 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At times apocalyptic and other times passionate and intimate, Eleonore Schönmaier’s poems show the beauty of the lived and natural world in both wilderness and urban settings. A woman hides her love letters in beehives, a cherry tree in full blossom is transported horizontally on a bike, and three crows tap their beaks on a metal door. A grandmother gestures how birds once flew in blue skies, public smiles are outlawed, and a shot-down jet lands in a field of wildflowers. Men from warm countries wear big coats and are falsely suspected of hiding bombs, an Indigenous man is forced by police into the trunk of a car, and a stork lands in prison under charges of espionage. In Canada, the northern village of Paradise is under evacuation orders, and in Europe Desmond Tutu steps down from a podium into a crowd of photographers. Over a Belgian lunch Frederic Rzewski talks about his piano concerto A Dog’s Life, and a Dutch dinner is shared with a young refugee boy who laughs joyously. Reflecting a childhood in the northern Canadian boreal forest, combined with an adult life lived without borders, Eleonore Schönmaier’s vivid and sensual language invites the reader to fully join in and enjoy the journey.

Download or read book Tablature written by Bruce Whiteman and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2015-01-15 with total page 94 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the "rubble [that] is the order of the day" in the opening poem to the longing for a "radiant happy ending" in the book's final line, Tablature is a book of poems that traverses a great swath of the heart's experience in compelling and lucid poetic language. Bruce Whiteman's first book of poems in traditional lined form in thirty years is by turns learned and allusive, and emotionally expressive and despairing. These poems engage three large and powerful subjects: the landscapes we see and abide in, music that is comforting and a guide to hearing the poem's compulsions, and love - erotic, domestic, and enduring. Whiteman is keenly observant of the natural world of birds and trees, of rocks and water, alive to the pressures and hurts of daily life, and above all to the ways in which music rescues us from dependency and pulls us back from a "cultivated hysteria." If there is an "intimate / apocalypse," there is also "radiant hope." The poems in Tablature capture readers with their singular music and their bright and unblinking takes on the quotidian challenges of living a life. These are poems of a highly tuned sensibility matched by a sweetness of language.

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.