Download or read book Wet Apples White Blood written by Naomi Guttman and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2007 with total page 90 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Naomi Guttman's new poetry collection was inspired by the role of nursing in human evolution and culture. The first cycle of poems, "Wet Apples, White Blood," offers lyric glimpses into archetypes of breastfeeding women in history and myth. The dramatic action in the second cycle, "Galactopoesis," centers around the experience of a mother whose young child is hospitalized. Galactopoesis is the medical term for the continued secretion and production of milk. It derives from the Greek radicals for 'milk' (galacto) and 'making' (poesis), which is also 'poetry.' In Wet Apples, White Blood, nursing, as a constant creative act dependent on the baby's demand, is a trope for the creative process and for questions of biology, psychology, and spirituality.
Download or read book Wet Apples White Blood written by Naomi Guttman and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2007-03-06 with total page 91 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Naomi Guttman's new poetry collection was inspired by the role of nursing in human evolution and culture. The first cycle of poems, "Wet Apples, White Blood," offers lyric glimpses into archetypes of breastfeeding women in history and myth. The dramatic action in the second cycle, "Galactopoesis," centers around the experience of a mother whose young child is hospitalized. Galactopoesis is the medical term for the continued secretion and production of milk. It derives from the Greek radicals for 'milk' (galacto) and 'making' (poesis), which is also 'poetry.' In Wet Apples, White Blood, nursing, as a constant creative act dependent on the baby's demand, is a trope for the creative process and for questions of biology, psychology, and spirituality.
Download or read book But for Now written by Gordon Johnston and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2013-09-01 with total page 86 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From "Anna's Lovers" Our houses glow both from within and on the outside: their night lights and an almost perfect and wintry moon. The phrase "but for now" means among other things "making do," as if we had to settle for the bare minimum. In But for Now, Gordon Johnston presents poems where the mortal world is more than enough because there is more to it than the merely mortal and where it is possible to hear beyond the outmoded clanking of inherited religious vocabularies. These poems find moments of grace in chance occurrences and through a wide range of styles and methods, they choreograph the random casual events of our existence. Northrop Frye famously asked, "Where is here?" These poems instead ask, "When is now?" Engaged with worlds of waiting and of doing, with enduring and healing, But for Now celebrates music and noise, speech and silence, and asserts that for all the darkness at the edges, there is something shining at the centre of the painting.
Download or read book The Art of Dying written by Sarah Tolmie and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2018-02-02 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hate to tell you, but you're going to die. / Quite soon. Me, too. / Shuck off the wisdom while it's warm. / Death does no harm / To wisdom. Sarah Tolmie's second collection of poems is a traditional ars moriendi, a how-to book on the practices of dying. Confronting the fear of death head-on, and describing the rituals that mitigate it, the poems in The Art of Dying take a satirical look at the ways we explain, enshrine, and, above all, evade death in contemporary culture. Some poems are personal – a parent tries to explain to a child why a grandfather is in hospital, or stages a funeral for a child's imaginary friend – while others comment on how death figures in the news, on TV, and in social media. Some poems ask if there is any place left for poets in our rituals of memory and commemoration. A few examine the apocalyptic language of climate change. Others poke fun at the death-defying claims of posthumanism. A thoughtful and irreverent collection about serious concerns, The Art of Dying begins and ends with the fact of death, and strips away our euphemisms about it.
Download or read book The Tantramar Re Vision written by Kevin Irie and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2021-08-04 with total page 142 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: I've lived the way a field is sometimes / a shelter for mice / or sometimes a source of game / for a hawk Inspired by the literary landscape of the late poet John Thompson, Kevin Irie's The Tantramar Re-Vision presents a portrait of nature where the benign and the bedevilled coexist, collude, or collide. The Tantramar Re-Vision charts routes of discovery as it follows trails, waterways, flights, and fears, be it through the woods, the wilds, the page, or the mind where "it's hard to admit / you are not to your taste." It questions an existence in which the inhuman thrives, ignorant of divinity, while the human psyche continues to search for answers as "life takes directions / away from" it. The Tantramar Marsh setting of John Thompson's Stilt Jack resonates with Irie's landscapes of birds, fish, plants, and wildlife, all still within reach yet part of a world where "wind carries sounds / it cannot hear." Insightful and meditative, The Tantramar Re-Vision is poetry of the inner self and the outside observer, a poetic testament to the ways literature creates its own landmarks and nature survives without knowing a word.
Download or read book Short Histories of Light written by Aidan Chafe and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2018-02-02 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shiver. Swift whip of wind. / Fangs of the low front / stinging fierce as forest fires. / Frost thickening the stoop. In his debut collection, Short Histories of Light, Aidan Chafe recounts his Catholic upbringing in a household dealing with the common but too often taboo subject of mental illness. In unflinching fashion, Chafe reveals the unintended disasters that follow those who struggle with depression and the frustration of loved ones left to pick up the pieces. Other sections of the book shine a light on the wounds inflicted by systems of patriarchy, particularly organized religion, and the caustic nature of humanity. Imagery and metaphor illuminate Chafe’s writing in a range of poetic forms, both modern and traditional. A boy stares helplessly through the walls of the family home, watches “filaments in glass skulls buzzing.” A father’s birthmark is described as a “scarlet letter.” Grandma is portrayed as a “forgotten girl on a Ferris wheel of feelings.” Vivid and haunting, at once tender and terse, Short Histories of Light captures what it feels like to be a short circuit in a world of darkness.
Download or read book The Danger Model written by Madelaine Caritas Longman and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2019-10-23 with total page 117 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This is poet's poetry, written with keen attention to inner harmonies and the see-saw of words. In an era of Instagram-driven micro-poetry, aka 'Like Poems,' all flimsy and whimsy, The Danger Model is an actual book crammed with actual poems. A vivid, fearless re-visiting of beloved free verse tropes, from dense, manic prose poems to singing, call-and-response, otherworldly hymns. A generous book, The Danger Model hardly feels like a first book. Rather the opposite – a collected works by a senior poet." Quebec Writers' Federation Concordia University First Book Prize jury
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 120 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.
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 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 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 Particles written by Michael Penny and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2011 with total page 107 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "There's a gap between where / an electron is and where it might be / and that's the only real work-place. / You occupy that office of possibility." Where are you in that space between the electron and the galaxy, and how do you find yourself there? Particles asks this question and answers it by asking more questions, conveying both the mystery and the uncertainty of the universe.
Download or read book The Milk of Amnesia written by Danielle Janess and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2021-03-24 with total page 92 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: fire / and water surging on the screen - / since children, metros, planets, beds, and lovers are / so lightly swept away - I must not even breathe. Danielle Janess's debut poetry collection resists the erasing effects of war, nationalism, and forced migration. Following the speaker's arduous relocation to a twenty-first-century Europe still etched with the wounds of the past, the poems take on daring forms and language, becoming theatre, film clips, photographs, and dance, all embodied by a cast of characters marked by the violence of the last century. Arrested in Warsaw within the first twenty days of the Second World War, Janess's maternal grandfather was sent to a Soviet gulag where he survived for three years before joining the Free Polish Army in Russia and later the battle of Monte Cassino in the Italian Campaign. Many of the poems in The Milk of Amnesia grow from the soil of Warsaw and Berlin, where the poet-speaker catapults herself and her young child in an effort to locate and unearth their family inheritance. Drawing from the tradition of poetry of witness, The Milk of Amnesia performs a visionary resistance, lit with signposts in a charged atmosphere. An address to our ongoing struggles with historical memory, these poems act as both artifact of and antidote to our time.
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.
Download or read book Unbound written by Gabrielle McIntire and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2021-07-15 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: inside sadness is glory / if you see it right way round, / find the seam, reverse it to perspectivize, / unwind light, joy's unravelling spool Inspired by mystical traditions, birdwatching, tree planting, ethics, neuropsychology, and quantum physics, Gabrielle McIntire's poems draw us in with their passionate attention to what it means to be human in a still-wondrous natural environment. Touching on human frailty, the eternal, and the ecological with a delicate and evocative brush, Unbound enacts an almost prayerful attentiveness to the earth's creatures and landscapes while it offers both mournful and humorous treatments of love and loss. McIntire's finely tuned musical voice – with its incantatory rhythms, rhymes, sound play, and entrancing double meanings – invites us to be courageously open to the unexpected. Unbound stirs us to re-evaluate our place amidst the astonishing beauty and wisdom of an Earth facing the early stages of climate change.
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 106 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.
Download or read book Blindfold written by John Asfour and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2011 with total page 107 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Blinded by a grenade in Lebanon as a teenager, poet John Asfour came to Canada armed with James Joyce's words, "For the eyes, they bring us nothing. I have a hundred worlds to create and I am only losing one of them." Blindfold investigates the ways in which disability influences our lives and is magnified in our minds. In a series of thematically linked poems, Asfour draws the metaphor of the blindfold across the eyes of sighted citizens who are impaired by estrangement, emotional complexity, and social pressures. A sense of exile and belonging dominates the poems, following the journey of a blind man whose life in his new land has been hampered by prejudice and barriers to communication. Exposing the rich and surprising possibilities of a life that has undergone a frightening transformation, Blindfold relates feelings of loss, displacement, and disorientation experienced not only by the disabled but by everyone who finds themselves separated from the norm.
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 128 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.
