Ken Norris

Asian Skies is the final book of Ken Norris’s travel trilogy. With Dante as his guide, he has previously left behind the predominantly European terrain of the first book, Limbo Road, only to find himself in the terra incognita of the new world of the second, Dominican Moon.

Now guideless, Norris continues his search for the metaphorical shortcut, …

In The Better Part of Heaven, Ken Norris deepens and extends both the form and content of his expanding body of work. A poetic journal of a journey through the South Pacific, it builds on both the Japanese and Canadian traditions of the travel poem/text, establishing the earthly journey as a metaphor for both a spiritual and an emotional quest.

Composed like a dark novel-in-verse, Dominican Moon is the second book in Ken Norris’s travel trilogy. With Dante as his guide, he leaves behind the predominantly European terrain of the first book in this series, Limbo Road, and finds himself in the “terra incognita” of the Caribbean Sea.

On his own contemporary voyage of discovery of the isl …

Fifty is the book Ken Norris began writing when he was 47 and stopped writing on the day he turned 50. It is both a counting and an accounting. He writes of love found and love lost, of children growing and parents dying, of political injustice, of the slow crawl through a Northern winter, of being in the genuine middle of life. Among its widely di …

Ken Norris? poems are among the most accomplished of his generation. Full Sun includes a compelling selection of work from eleven previous collections, as well as several new poems.

If, as Robert Creeley said, “form is never more than an extension of content,” what happens when we lose form” Does content retreat into its ruins, its absences” Can we never go home because it retreats from us as relentlessly and unfathomably as our future” Is the imagination of “our” future as illusory and unreliable as the memory o …

Since 1975, Ken Norris has produced some of Canada’s most intriguing poetry. Whether detailing the amorous lives of produce (Vegetables), documenting travels to the South Seas (The Better Part of Heaven and Islands), engaging contentious social and political issues (In the Spirit of the Times and In the House of No), or taking the measure of the …

Never before in Canada has there been a book of poems like this. Endre Farkas and Ken Norris, with a little help from Artie Gold and Tom Konyves, have collaborated to produce a collection of satiric poems that poke fun at everyone: from the Baby Boomers to rabid nationalists and sell-out Canucks.In the honourable tradition of satire, Howl Too, Eh? …

Just as for Dante, for whom the image of the beloved gave entrance to a complete imagination of the world, an “imago mundi,” the betrayal of a beloved can also shatter the poet’s vision, no matter how elaborately conceived. Such a betrayal can turn the world upside down, where what was loved is now hated, what was benign becomes threatening, …

Rua Da Felicidade is an actual place, a "Street of Happiness" in colonial Macau, where from the 1920s to the 1950s it was said that every desire could be fulfilled — for a price. It is a book written against the appropriative gesture, against the grain of what we too often believe we can possess for a price. Instead, the book turns on the seams o …

Tom Konyves? Sleepwalking Among the Camels includes compelling selections from his groundbreaking books No Parking (1978), Poetry in Performance (1982), and Ex Perimeter (1988) as well as a section of exciting new work. A must read for lovers of Canadian Surrealism.

"He is in short, a poet, and a good one. The world he inhabits is a geographically, politically and emotionally extensive one in which he is entirely comfortable in his own skin, and therefore able to register the surrounding phenomena exactly." - Michael Fournier, Hiram Poetry Review