Download or read book Fierce Departures written by Dionne Brand and published by Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 60 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The selections in "Fierce Departures," drawn from Dionne Brand s work since 1997, delineate with searing eloquence how history marks and dislocates peoples of the African diaspora, how nations, concretely and conceptually, fail to create safe haven, and how human desire persists nevertheless. Through a widening canvas, Brand unfolds the (im)possibilities of belonging for those whom history has dispossessed. Yet she also shows how Canada, and in particular Toronto, remade by those who alight on it, is a place of contingency. Known for her linguistic intensity and lyric brilliance, Brand consoles through the beauty of her work and disturbs with its uncompromising demand for ethical witness. In her introduction, editor Leslie C. Sanders traces the evolution of Brand s poetic concerns and changing vision. In particular, she observes Brand s complex use of landscape and language to delineate the ethical and emotional issues around the desire for place. She argues that Brand reformulates Northrop Frye s question Where is here?, disturbing and expanding the national imaginary. As afterword, Brand has selected passages from her evocative collection of essays "A Map to the Door of No Return." Read as an "ars poetica," the passages summon the presences of those whose lives are circumscribed by the histories the poet narrates as her own. "
Download or read book The False Laws of Narrative written by Fred Wah and published by Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press. This book was released on 2011-04-07 with total page 127 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The False Laws of Narrative is a selection of Fred Wah’s poems covering the poets entire poetic trajectory to date. A founding editor of Tish magazine, Wah was influenced by leading progressive and innovative poets of the 1960s and was at the forefront of the exploration of racial hybridity, multiculturalism, and transnational family roots in poetry. The selection emphasizes his innovative poetic range. Wah is renowned as one of Canada’s finest and most complex lyric poets and has been lauded for the musicality of his verse. Louis Cabri’s introduction offers a paradigm for thinking about how sound is actually structured in Wah’s improvisatory poetry and offers fresh insights into Wah’s context and writing. In an afterword by the poet himself, Wah presents a dialogue between editor and poet on the key themes of the selected poems and reveals his abiding concerns as poet and thinker.
Download or read book Old In Art School written by Nell Painter and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2019-08-27 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, this memoir of one woman's later in life career change is “a smart, funny and compelling case for going after your heart's desires, no matter your age” (Essence). Following her retirement from Princeton University, celebrated historian Dr. Nell Irvin Painter surprised everyone in her life by returning to school––in her sixties––to earn a BFA and MFA in painting. In Old in Art School, she travels from her beloved Newark to the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design; finds meaning in the artists she loves, even as she comes to understand how they may be undervalued; and struggles with the unstable balance between the pursuit of art and the inevitable, sometimes painful demands of a life fully lived. How are women and artists seen and judged by their age, looks, and race? What does it mean when someone says, “You will never be an artist”? Who defines what an artist is and all that goes with such an identity, and how are these ideas tied to our shared conceptions of beauty, value, and difference? Bringing to bear incisive insights from two careers, Painter weaves a frank, funny, and often surprising tale of her move from academia to art in this "glorious achievement––bighearted and critical, insightful and entertaining. This book is a cup of courage for everyone who wants to change their lives" (Tayari Jones, author of An American Marriage).
Download or read book Public Poetics written by Bart Vautour and published by Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press. This book was released on 2015-06-18 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Public Poetics is a collection of essays and poems that address some of the most pressing issues of the discipline in the twenty-first century. The collection brings together fifteen original essays addressing “publics,” “poetry,” and “poetics” from the situated space of Canada while simultaneously troubling the notion of the nation as a stable term. It asks hard questions about who and what count as “publics” in Canada. Critical essays stand alongside poetry as visual and editorial reminders of the cross-pollination required in thinking through both poetry and poetics. Public Poetics is divided into three thematic sections. The first contains essays surveying poetics in the present moment through the lens of the public/private divide, systematic racism in Canada, the counterpublic, feminist poetics, and Canadian innovations on postmodern poetics. The second section contains author-specific studies of public poets. The final section contains essays that use innovative renderings of “poetics” as a means of articulating alternative communities and practices. Each section is paired with a collection of original poetry by ten contemporary Canadian poets. This collection attends to the changing landscape of critical discourse around poetry and poetics in Canada, and will be of use to teachers and students of poetry and poetics.
Download or read book With the Witnesses written by Dale Tracy and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2017-06-09 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While trauma theory has been adopted by contemporary literary and cultural studies as an ethical way to study depictions of suffering, there is a risk that its present use could cause more harm than good. By emphasizing inaccessible histories, unspeakable suffering, and unconscious witnessing, trauma theory may lead readers to claim others’ suffering through empathic identification. In With the Witnesses, Dale Tracy argues that poetry offers an alternative approach to engage with not only suffering in art but suffering in general. Examining the strategies of witness poetry, Tracy interrogates and reformulates the dominant models of trauma studies in which readers take over the witnessing position by identifying with the speaker as a witness. If the purpose of reading such poetry is to contribute to a chain of witnesses, what is the distinct role of a reader, and how does it differ from the role of the poem’s speaker? Tracy proposes that metonymy – a logic of nearness rather than likeness – is compassion’s formal manifestation. Analyzing poetry that emphasizes the contiguity of metonymy over the substitution of metaphor, she attends to the positions into which witnessing speakers invite readers. Poems that respond to diverse national and transnational contexts of atrocity, conflict, and marginalization guide With the Witnesses toward a compassionate response to suffering that involves feeling with – not as – another. Following each poem as a unique theory of compassion, With the Witnesses demonstrates that poems hold suffering signed as art, not claimable traces of suffering.
Download or read book Space Between Her Lips written by Margaret Christakos and published by Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press. This book was released on 2017-04-13 with total page 131 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Space Between Her Lips presents the first selected works of one of Canada's most important poets of the last few decades. Margaret Christakos writes vibrant, exciting, and intellectually challenging poetry. She plays language games that bring a probing and disturbing humour to serious themes that range from childhood and children to women in contemporary techno-capitalist society to feminist literary theory, and so much more. Gregory Betts’ introduction to the collection highlights her formal diversity and her unique combination of feminist and avant-garde affinities. He connects the geographies of her life — including Northern Ontario where she was raised, downtown Toronto where she studied with cutting-edge authors and artists like bpNichol and Michael Snow, and Montreal where she integrated with the country’s leading feminist authors and thinkers — with her polyphonic experimentation. While traversing the problem of bifurcated identities, Christakos is funny at a deeply semiotic level, wickedly wry, exposing something about the way we think by examining the way we speak of it. In her afterword, Christakos maps out a philosophy of writing that highlights her self-consciousness of the foibles of language but also deep concern for the themes she writes about, including her career-length exploration of self-discovery, hetero-, queer and bi-sexual sexualities, motherhood, self-care, and linguistic alienation. Indeed, Margaret Christakos is a whole-body poet, writing with the materiality of language about the movement of interior thought to embodied experience in the world.
Download or read book Chamber Music written by Jan Zwicky and published by Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press. This book was released on 2015-01-13 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Arcing across thirty years and seven volumes, Jan Zwicky’s poetry has always been acutely musical (and sensitive to the silence out of which music comes). In the compositions in Chamber Music, the first anthology of Zwicky’s poems, one may perceive the attunement of her vocations: poet, philosopher, violinist. Her poetry both praises and relinquishes the earth, bearing witness to the fierce skies of the prairies and the freezing rain of the West Coast. Enacting the virtue of clarity prized and defended by her explicitly philosophical work, this poetry is both resonant and integrated. It is also formally diverse, ranging from the singular focus of the lyric ode to suites of variations and fugal structures, from polyphonic textures to the sprawling reach of narrative gestures. Throughout, one feels the deft hand of an adept using powerful metaphors to explore themes of colonial violence, environmental devastation, spiritual catastrophe, and transformation. Resisting Western philosophy’s exclusion of imagination from civic life, Zwicky’s poetry is noteworthy for the tension it achieves between the abstract and the personal, the general and the particular. Meditating repeatedly on themes of love and grief, this poetry is at once passionately committed to the lucidity of its utterances and the fidelity of its images.
Download or read book Rivering written by Daphne Marlatt and published by Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press. This book was released on 2014-04-23 with total page 97 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Opening doors, dreaming awake, tracing networks of music and meaning, Marlatt’s poetry stands out as an essential engagement with what matters to anyone writing with a social-environmental conscience. Rivering includes poems inspired by the village of Steveston where, before the war, a Japanese-Canadian community lived within the rhythms of salmon on the Fraser River delta. Also gathered into Rivering: lesbian love poetry from Touch to my Tongue; a transformance of Nicole Brossard’s Mauve; passages from The Given, winner of the 2009 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize; a traditional “Kuri” song from the Noh drama, The Gull; and an unpublished excerpt from the chamber opera “Shadow Catch.” Difficult, beautiful, heart-breaking realities of the twenty-first century are urgently immediate in selections from Liquidities: Vancouver Poems Then and Now. All of the poems speak to Marlatt’s poetics of place and of language as passage between distant or disparate human beings, and between human beings and the more-than-human world. The selections are framed by Susan Knutson’s deeply attentive critical introduction and by Marlatt’s “immediacies of writing,” a new lyrical essay investigating the act of writing. Closing with a walking meditation situated by her Buddhist practice, Rivering is both a “pocket Marlatt” and an introduction to one of the best poets of our time.
Download or read book Plans Deranged by Time written by George Fetherling and published by Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press. This book was released on 2012-05-01 with total page 102 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Toronto Star called him a legendary figure in Canadian writing, and indeed George Fetherling has been prolific in many genres: poetry, history, travel narrative, memoir, and cultural studies. Plans Deranged by Time is a representative selection from many of the twelve poetry collections he has published since the late 1960s. Like his novels and other fiction, many of these poems are anchored in a sense of place—often a very urban one. Filled with aphorism and sharp observation, the poems are spare of line and metaphor; they display a kind of elegant realism: loading docks, back doors of restaurants, doughnut shops with karate schools upstairs. In the introduction, A.F. Moritz places Fetherling in the modern picaresque tradition in the aftermath of Eliot and Pound, highlighting his characteristic speaker as an itinerant cosmopolitan outsider, a kind of flâneur, impoverished and keenly observant, writing from a position of “communion-in-isolation.” He contrasts Fetherling’s contemplative intellectualism with that of the public intellectual and highlights this outsider’s fellow-feeling, making the poems indirectly political. Fetherling’s afterword is an anecdote-anchored exploration of what the poet sees as his two central approaches—“the desire to create new codes of hearing” and “writing-to-heal”—and how they are reflected in the collection.
Download or read book Sonosyntactics written by Paul Dutton and published by Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press. This book was released on 2015-11-07 with total page 109 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sonosyntactics introduces the reader to over forty-five years of Paul Dutton’s diverse and inventive poetry, ranging from lyrics, prose poems, and visual work to performance texts and scores. Perhaps best known for his acclaimed solo sound performances and his contributions to the iconic sound poetry group The Four Horsemen, Dutton is a surprising, witty, sensitive, and innovative explorer of language and of the human. This volume gathers a representative selection of his most significant and characteristic poetry together with a generous selection of uncollected new work. Sonosyntactics demonstrates Dutton’s willingness to (re)invent and stretch language and to listen for new possibilities while at the same time engaging with his perennial concerns—love, sex, music, time, thought, humour, the materiality of language, and poetry itself. Gary Barwin’s introduction outlines the major subjects and techniques of Dutton’s poetry: an intricate weaving of thought and language, sound and emotion, sound and sense, and the unfolding of a text through the logic of language play such as puns, paradoxes, ambiguity, and sound relations. In an afterword by Dutton himself, the poet insightfully lays out the terms of his engagement with the materiality—both visual and aural—of language, often beyond the purely recountable, representational, or depictive.
Download or read book Social Poesis written by Rachel Zolf and published by Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press. This book was released on 2019-05-16 with total page 106 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Social Poesis introduces readers to the work of one of Canada’s most exciting and challenging poets. Through selections from across Rachel Zolf's poetic oeuvre, this book foregrounds the philosophical, ethical, and political questions that inform Zolf's poetry. Selections range from early poems in which Zolf explores transhistorical trauma and queer subjectivity to more recent writings that examine militarism, settler colonialism, and other forms of state-sanctioned violence. Zolf’s poetry enacts what she calls a “social poesis”; she is attuned to questions of ethical responsibility and the role, and limitations, of poetry as a tool for ethical thinking, political engagement, accountability, and bearing witness. Heather Milne's introduction examines Zolf's compositional strategies, tracing the evolution of Zolf’s writing from an autobiographical poetics, in which Zolf as subject/speaker is locatable, toward a poetics that moves beyond the self to address political and ethical relations among subjects of geopolitics and settler colonialism. In her afterword, Zolf focuses on her most recent work, in which poems are composed almost entirely from archival sources and enact a kind of collective assemblage of enunciation.
Download or read book Guthrie Clothing written by Phil Hall and published by Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press. This book was released on 2015-07-23 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Increasingly known as the “poet’s poet,” Governor General’s Award–winner Phil Hall has long been a constructor of intricate sequences, collecting and arranging lines and phrases, artifacts, and small revelations. He writes on influences, literary and local; he writes of rural Ontario, attempting to comprehend a deeply personal family violence; he stitches together lines and tall tales and fables from his life and the stories that float around the ethos of his variety of Ontario wilds. Hall’s isn’t a poetry carved into perfect diamond form but a poetry whittled from scores of found materials pulled apart and rearranged. This volume is not so much a “selected poems” as it is a reshuffle, a sampler from the span of Hall’s published work. Guthrie Clothing is a collage-selection by Hall. Lines, stanzas, and poem-fragments are reworked and patterned into a new sequence, a fresh structure. The afterword consists of an important new essay-poem by Hall as well. It argues against irony from a rural perspective and amounts to Hall’s ars poetica. In an encompassing introduction, rob mclennan explores Hall’s four-plus decades of bricolage.
Download or read book A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None written by Kathryn Yusoff and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2018-11-02 with total page 157 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rewriting the “origin stories” of the Anthropocene No geology is neutral, writes Kathryn Yusoff. Tracing the color line of the Anthropocene, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None examines how the grammar of geology is foundational to establishing the extractive economies of subjective life and the earth under colonialism and slavery. Yusoff initiates a transdisciplinary conversation between feminist black theory, geography, and the earth sciences, addressing the politics of the Anthropocene within the context of race, materiality, deep time, and the afterlives of geology. Forerunners is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital works. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.
Download or read book Verse and Worse written by Steve McCaffery and published by Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press. This book was released on 2010-01-26 with total page 91 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Verse and Worse: Selected and New Poems of Steve McCaffery 1989–2009 presents texts from the last two decades of work by Steve McCaffery, one of the most influential and innovative of contemporary poets. The volume focuses on selections from McCaffery’s major texts, including The Black Debt, Theory of Sediment, The Cheat of Words, and Slightly Left of Thinking, but also features a substantial number of previously ungathered poems. As playful as they are cerebral, McCaffery’s poems stage an incessant departure from conventional lyrical and narrative methods of making meaning. For those encountering McCaffery’s work for the first time as well as for those who have followed the twists and turns of his astonishingly heterogeneous poetic trajectory over the past four decades—this volume is essential reading.
Download or read book The Order in Which We Do Things written by Tom Wayman and published by Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press. This book was released on 2014-03-24 with total page 141 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tom Wayman’s poetry has been published around the world to great acclaim. Wayman is one of Canada’s most prolific and public poets, and his writing since the 1960s has been by turns angry, engaged, hopeful, tender, and hilarious. His voice and persona are his alone but simultaneously ours too. His recurring themes—work, mortality, love, lust, friendship, the natural world—make his work a poetry of human inevitabilities, a poetry that exults in the inevitability of seeing poetry in the everyday. Wayman’s craft is poïesis (from the Ancient Greek “to make”)—making a change, making a difference, making a ruckus, making the most of our time. His working life has always been inextricable from his writing one; his poems offer an honest and candid consideration of the ideological underpinnings, practical realities, and subtle beauties of a life lived on job sites and picket lines, in union halls, classrooms, and book-stuffed offices, and on the page itself. The Order in Which We Do Things is a collection of more than thirty of Wayman’s best poems, selected and introduced by Owen Percy. Percy’s introduction explores the genesis of Wayman’s print persona and contextualizes his politically engaged, conversational voice within the pantheon of its various publics. In his afterword, “Work and Silence,” Wayman reflects on his more than forty years in print as a work poet, and underlines poetry’s sustained power to engage readers, invite solidarity, and stoke the fires of critical resistance to the order in which we do things.
Download or read book A Different Species of Breathing written by Sue Goyette and published by Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press. This book was released on 2023-05-16 with total page 101 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What can it look like for poetry to bear witness? What might it feel like for a poem to keep company? A Different Species of Breathing: The Poetry of Sue Goyette offers an introduction to the work of a poet whose writing attends to these large and connected questions. Goyette’s poetry experiments with (and pushes at the edges of) lyric poetry to explore webs of connection. Whether considering the ways in which systems of care fail children, the devastating reach of Big Pharma, the reciprocal relationship between oceans and humans, or the possibilities that rest in rewriting one’s own story, Goyette’s poetry is rooted in the work of witnessing and being in company with others. A Different Species of Breathing opens with an introduction by scholar, editor, and poet Bart Vautour, which offers readers context for Goyette’s lyric innovations as well as her key poetic concerns. A selection chosen from across Goyette’s published work then presents readers with poems that appear in chronological order to ground readers in the poet’s trajectories of thinking. The volume closes with a new and previously unpublished interview between Goyette and scholar and writer Erin Wunker. For scholars, poetry aficionados, students, and those interested in questions of care, connection, and ecosystems.
Download or read book Nomenclature written by Dionne Brand and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2022-09-12 with total page 529 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Spanning almost four decades, Dionne Brand’s poetry has given rise to whole new grammars and vocabularies. With a profound alertness that is attuned to this world and open to some other, possibly future, time and place, Brand’s ongoing labors of witness and imagination speak directly to where and how we live and reach beyond those worlds, their enclosures, and their violences. Nomenclature: New and Collected Poems begins with a new long poem, the titular Nomenclature for the Time Being, in which Dionne Brand’s diaspora consciousness dismantles our quotidian disasters. In addition to this searing new work, Nomenclature collects eight volumes of Brand’s poetry published between 1982 and 2010 and includes a critical introduction by the literary scholar and theorist Christina Sharpe. Nomenclature: New and Collected Poems features the searching and centering cantos of Primitive Offensive; the sharp musical conversations of Winter Epigrams and Epigrams to Ernesto Cardenal in Defense of Claudia; and the documentary losses of revolutions in Chronicles of the Hostile Sun, in which “The street was empty/with all of us standing there.” No Language Is Neutral reads language, coloniality, and sexuality as a nexus. Land to Light On writes intimacies and disaffections with nation, while in thirsty a cold-eyed flâneur surveys the workings of the city. In Inventory, written during the Gulf Wars, the poet is “the wars’ last and late night witness,” her job is not to soothe but to “revise and revise this bristling list/hourly.” Ossuaries’ futurist speaker rounds out the collection and threads multiple temporal worlds—past, present, and future. This masterwork displays Dionne Brand’s ongoing body of thought—trenchant, lyrical, absonant, discordant, and meaning-making. Nomenclature: New and Collected Poems is classic and living, a record of one of the great writers of our age.
