Download or read book The Crisp Day Closing on My Hand written by M. Travis Lane and published by Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press. This book was released on 2010-02-16 with total page 102 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Crisp Day Closing on My Hand: The Poetry of M. Travis Lane is a collection of thirty-five of her best poems, selected with an introduction by Jeanette Lynes. An environmentalist, feminist, and peace activist, M. Travis Lane is known for witty and meticulously crafted poems that explore the elusive nature of “home” in both historical and present contexts and reflect on the identity of the woman poet and what it means to be a writer. Lane’s poems exhibit impressive range and variety—long poems, short lyrics, serial poems, poems inspired by visual art—and are richly attentive to the landscapes, both urban and wild, of her New Brunswick home. They voice a sense of urgency with respect to ecological crises and war; her poetic attention fixes unwaveringly on the smallest pebble on the coast of Fundy but is equally attuned to global patterns of destructive domination. In her introduction “As Opportunity for Grace, This Life May Serve”, editor Jeanette Lynes discusses how Lane’s poetry integrates an ecopoetic vision with explorations of the artist’s task of mapping her world. Lane’s afterword reinforces her sense of the poet’s project as a form of mystical play, a search for patterns in the “unified disunities” of all things.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Canadian Literature written by Cynthia Conchita Sugars and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 993 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of Canadian Literature provides a broad-ranging introduction to some of the key critical fields, genres, and periods in Canadian literary studies. The essays in this volume, written by prominent theorists in the field, reflect the plurality of critical perspectives, regional and historical specializations, and theoretical positions that constitute the field of Canadian literary criticism across a range of genres and historical periods. The volume provides a dynamic introduction to current areas of critical interest, including (1) attention to the links between the literary and the public sphere, encompassing such topics as neoliberalism, trauma and memory, citizenship, material culture, literary prizes, disability studies, literature and history, digital cultures, globalization studies, and environmentalism or ecocriticism; (2) interest in Indigenous literatures and settler-Indigenous relations; (3) attention to multiple diasporic and postcolonial contexts within Canada; (4) interest in the institutionalization of Canadian literature as a discipline; (5) a turn towards book history and literary history, with a renewed interest in early Canadian literature; (6) a growing interest in articulating the affective character of the "literary" - including an interest in affect theory, mourning, melancholy, haunting, memory, and autobiography. The book represents a diverse array of interests -- from the revival of early Canadian writing, to the continued interest in Indigenous, regional, and diasporic traditions, to more recent discussions of globalization, market forces, and neoliberalism. It includes a distinct section dedicated to Indigenous literatures and traditions, as well as a section that reflects on the discipline of Canadian literature as a whole.
Download or read book The Essential Travis Lane written by M. Travis Lane and published by The Porcupine's Quill. This book was released on 2015-09-28 with total page 68 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inspired by nature, science, topics in the news, art and music, New Brunswick poet M. Travis Lane is prolific yet eschews the spotlight. She has won the Atlantic Poetry Prize, the Alden Nowlan Prize for Excellence and the Banff Centre Bliss Carmen Poetry Award, among a host of others. The Essential Travis Lane celebrates her lilting, insightful work by bringing to the fore a selection of her shorter poems—many of them out of print—that demonstrate her signature clear-eyed perceptiveness and rhythmic formal technique. These poems are fine examples of her linguistic mastery, as well as the wisdom and heart that characterize her voice. The Essential Poets Series presents the works of Canada’s most celebrated poets in a package that is beautiful, accessible and affordable. The Essential Travis Lane is the 13th volume in the series.
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 Certain Details written by Nelson Ball and published by Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press. This book was released on 2017-03-15 with total page 106 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nelson Ball has had a significant impact on contemporary Canadian poetry not only as a poet but as an editor, with his Weed/Flower Press in the 1960s and 70s. Certain Details provides a major overview of the breadth and many paths of Ball’s poetry over six decades. This selection of his work includes his trademark minimalist poems in addition to longer works and sequences; it spans nature poems, homages, meditations, narratives, found poems, and visual poems. The book contains selections from all of Ball’s major collections as well as works that have previously appeared only in chapbook or ephemeral form. In a generous and thoughtful afterword, and for the first time in print, Ball discusses his processes, influences, and aesthetics. The book is introduced by editor and poet Stuart Ross, who offers a personal entry point into Nelson Ball’s extraordinary oeuvre.
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 113 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 From Room to Room written by Eli Mandel and published by Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press. This book was released on 2011-09-28 with total page 86 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The career of Eli Mandel (1922–1992) was one of the most prolific and distinguished in all of Canadian literature, yet in recent years his work has gone unsung compared with that of such peers as Margaret Atwood, Leonard Cohen, Robert Kroetsch, Irving Layton, and P.K. Page. Though he was a critic, anthologist, and editor of national prominence, Mandel’s legacy resides most securely in his poetry, which earned many accolades. From Room to Room: The Poetry of Eli Mandel presents thirty-five of Mandel’s best poems written over four decades, from the 1950s to the 1980s. The selection covers the most prominent themes in Mandel’s work, including his Russian-Jewish heritage, his Saskatchewan upbringing, his interest in classical and biblical archetypes, and his concern for the political and social issues of his time. The book also highlights the way in which Mandel’s work bridged the formal attributes of modernist poetry with contemporary, sometimes experimental, poetics. Complete with a scholarly introduction by Peter Webb and a literary afterword by Andrew Stubbs, From Room to Room makes a worthy addition to the Laurier Poetry Series, which presents affordable editions of contemporary Canadian poetry for use in the classroom and the enjoyment of anyone wishing to read some of the finest poetry Canada has to offer.
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 102 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 A Possible Trust written by Ronna Bloom and published by Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press. This book was released on 2023-09-12 with total page 92 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With compassion, humour and sharp-eyed irreverence, Ronna Bloom's work has made a significant impact on Canadian poetry. A Possible Trust is selected from her work to date. Bloom writes concisely of the precarious, the ephemeral, the epic, and of the fragility and determination of people in daily life and extraordinary health crises. She is attentive to suffering, as well as to spontaneous connections and gestures of love. Her poetry has been used by teachers, architects, spiritual leaders, and in hospitals across Canada. This is poetry engaged with spontaneity, presence, work, and health care. There is a tenderness here where living matters, as does dying, a valuing of the incident, the encounter, the unexpected, the sorrow and the bowl-me-over delight. Bloom speaks to us about how vulnerability, suffering, and the release into joy, can combine as an ongoing, never-ending life practice. She mines her own experience while looking out into the world with awareness, empathy and the willingness to risk being wide open. These poems stand firm with readers. Editor and poet Phil Hall's Introduction "To Lead by Crying" argues for a poetics of empathy, and is an enthusiastic retrospective of Bloom's work. In Ronna Bloom's Afterword, she traces the relevance of photography, psychotherapy, and meditation in her work. Defiant, comical, revealing, impolite yet respectful, A Possible Trust is a retrospective and celebration.
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 S hk yihta written by Louise Bernice Halfe and published by Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press. This book was released on 2018-05-16 with total page 134 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “I build this story like my lair. One willow, / a rib at a time” — “The Crooked Good” Since 1990, Sky Dancer Louise Bernice Halfe’s work has stood out as essential testimony to Indigenous experiences within the ongoing history of colonialism and the resilience of Indigenous storytellers. Sôhkêyihta includes searing poems, written across the expanse of Halfe’s career, aimed at helping readers move forward from the darkness into a place of healing. Halfe’s own afterword is an evocative meditation on the Cree word sôhkêyihta: Have courage. Be brave. Be strong. She writes of coming into her practice as a poet and the stories, people, and experiences that gave her courage and allowed her to construct her “lair.” She also reflects on her relationship with nêhiyawêwin, the Cree language, and the ways in which it informs her relationships and poetics. The introduction by David Gaertner situates Halfe’s writing within the history of whiteness and colonialism that works to silence and repress Indigenous voices. Gaertner pays particular attention to the ways in which Halfe addresses, incorporates, and pushes back against silence, and suggests that her work is an act of bearing witness – what Kwagiulth scholar Sarah Hunt identifies as making Indigenous lives visible.
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 83 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 All These Roads written by Louis Dudek and published by Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press. This book was released on 2008-04-24 with total page 88 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A passionate believer in the power of art—and especially poetry—to influence and critique contemporary culture, Louis Dudek devoted much of his life to shaping the Canadian literary scene through his meditative and experimental poems as well as his work in publishing and teaching. All These Roads: The Poetry of Louis Dudek brings together thirty-five of Dudek’s poems written over the course of his sixty-year career. Much of Dudek’s poetry is about the practice of art, with comment on the way the craft of poetry is mediated by such factors as university classes, public readings, reviews, commercial presses, and academic conferences. The poems in this selection—witty satires, short lyrics, and long sequences—reflect self-consciously on the relationship between art and life and will draw readers into the dramatic mid-century literary and cultural debates in which Dudek was an important participant. Karis Shearer’s introduction provides an overview of Dudek’s prolific career as poet, professor, editor, publisher, and critic, and considers the ways in which Dudek’s functional poems help, both formally and thematically, to carry out the tasks associated with those roles. Comparing Dudek’s reception to that of NourbeSe Philip, Marilyn Dumont, and Roy Miki, Frank Davey’s afterword locates Dudek in a pre-1980s version of multiculturalism that is more complex than many critics would have it. According to Davey, Dudek broadened the limits on the possible range and type of poetry for subsequent generations of Canadian writers.
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 Barking Biting written by Sina Queyras and published by Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press. This book was released on 2016-03-31 with total page 91 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection brings together representative work from Sina Queyras’s poetic oeuvre. Queyras is at the forefront of contemporary discussions of genre, gender, and criticism of poetry. Her influential blog-turned-literary-magazine, Lemon Hound, published up-and-coming writers as well as work by established literary figures in Canada and abroad. The title, Barking & Biting, makes reference to the tagline of Lemon Hound: “more bark than bite.” Erin Wunker’s introduction situates Queyras’s poetry within ongoing debates around genre and gender. It suggests that Queyras’s writing, be it literary critical, poetic, or prose, is precise and probing but avoids toothless critical positioning. It pays particular attention to Queyras’s poetic innovations and intertextual references to other women writers, and suggests that read together Queyras’s oeuvre embodies an engaged feminist attention—what Joan Retallack has called a “poethics,” where poetry and ethics are bound together as a mode of inquiry and aesthetics. Queyras’s poems trace a consistent concern with both poetic genealogies and the status of women. Thus far, twenty-first century poetics have been preoccupied with two ongoing conversations: the perceived divide between lyric and conceptual writing, and the underrepresentation of women and other non-dominant subjects. While these two topics may seem epistemologically and ethically separate, they are in fact irrevocably intertwined. Questions of form are, at their root, questions of visibility and recognizability. Will the reader know a poem when she sees it? And will that seeing alter her perception of the world? And how is the form of the poem altered, productively or un-, by the identity politics of its author? These are the questions that undergird Queyras’s poetry and guide the editorial selections. Queyras’s poetics pay dogged attention to questions of both representation and genre. In each of her poetry collections she inhabits tenets of the traditional lyric but leverages the genre open to let conceptualism in. This is demonstrated in her afterword, “Lyric Conceptualism, a Manifesto in Progress,” which was first published on the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet the Blog. In it Queyras puts forward a set of maxims about the possibilities of a new hybrid, the conceptual lyric poem.
Download or read book Post glacial written by Robert Kroetsch and published by Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press. This book was released on 2019-10-15 with total page 124 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Post-glacial is a collection of poems by Robert Kroetsch selected by his former student David Eso. The book features Kroetsch’s iconic collection, Completed Field Notes, alongside rare work gathered from different stages of Kroetsch’s career. The book contains an afterword by Aritha van Herk. Kroetsch’s poetry evolved from short lyric poetry in the 1960s to postmodern long poems in the 1970s and 80s. Kroetsch’s work in the 1990s and 2000s was marked by the production of experimental chapbooks. Yet it is in the 2000s that Kroetsch’s celebrated The Hornbooks of Rita K and his final collection, Too Bad, were published. Post-glacial presents the material in a thematic arc that follows daily, seasonal, and biographical topics. The collection moves from moods of morning, spring, and youth to shades of darkness, winter, and mourning. In the introduction, Eso charts Kroetsch’s early attempts at poetry in his teenage and undergraduate years. Eso takes the title Post-glacial from the poem “Lonesome Writer Diptych” and proposes the term as an alternative to “postmodernism,” a term often used by critics to describe Kroetsch’s work. Post-glacial emphasizes the poet’s interest in landscape, ecology, history, the presence of absence, and the endurance of a living past.
