Brick Books and the Long Poem
Created by brickbooks on April 27, 2012
Luskville Reductions, The
The Luskville Reductions records a year in the life of a small Quebec town and the marriage that disintegrates there. While a book about loss, it is also a book about the state of becoming that coexists with change, the imbalance that for a time makes everything lucid, all the details adding up to much more than only an "us." The visible goes beyon …
Night Work
A hockey saga, wrapping the game's story in the "intense, moody, contradictory&3quot; character of Terry Sawchuk, one of its greatest goalies.
Denied the leap and dash up the ice,
what goalies know is side to side, an inwardness of monk
and cell. They scrape. They sweep. Their eyes are elsewhere
as they contemplate their narrow place. Like saints, …
Pale as Real Ladies
In powerful language that reflects the conflicts between the primitive and the sophisticated, Joan Crate redreams the passions which animated and tormented her famous predecessor. Part white, part Mohawk princess, Pauline Johnson /Tekahionwake would perform her poems first in buckskin, then, after the intermission, in silk.
Pisscat Songs
Ed Dyck finds that you cannot say "piss" on the radio in Saskatoon. There wasn't very much radio promotion of his book. That's a shame. Everybody should know about the cat Jack and the world Dyck compacts around him in 15 "sonnets."
Riffs
Riffs is the story of a passionate love affair, told in vintage Lee style - with whoops, deep chords, and headlong improvisational arcs. We hear Bach, Bo Diddley, Bird; the news is heartache and being. Celebratory, catastrophic, the poem tracks ways in which eros and our lives are made mutually accountable. Riffs is a landmark achievement from the …
Robinson’s Crossing
My great- grandmother slept in a boxcar on the night before she made the crossing. The steel ended in Sangudo then, there was no trestle on the Pembina, no siding on the other side. They crossed by ferry, and went on by cart through bush, the same eight miles. Anothe rfamily legend has it that she stood there in the open doorway of the shack and sa …
Short Talks
Lyric sermons: Riddle-poems that consist only of answers: Lou Reid meets Claude Monet and converts to Zen: The pure hilarious ache of ontology: Short Talks is elegiac, perceptive, droll. It is the first book-length collection by an accomplished, original voice. Sunday mornings are never going to be the same again.
"The voice is laconic and composed …
