Persuasion for a Mathematician* enlists friends and a child, a mathematician, a cleaning lady in Toronto's Rosedale, and the ardent chronicles of Renaissance painters and princes to grapple with the urgent question, Why Live? The reflexive reply *you must take my word for it* hitches itself out in buckets of water and silver polish, meadows and invention, Conception Bay icebergs and Leonardo's Great Swan, and takes flight. || Lucid, painterly, rich in idiom and movement, Page's *Persuasion* is at once call and answer, chorus and response, a great antiphon that opens fiercely to dialogue and insists on life.

Joanne Page is the author of two previous books of poetry: Persuasion For A Mathematician (Pedlar Press, 2003), and The River & The Lake (Quarry Press, 1993). She lives in Kingston, Ontario. Of this recent work, she writes: "Eight years ago I sailed up the west coast of Greenland, into Disco Bay. There the icebergs calve off the massive Greenland icefield. I could not have imagined such an astonishing sight. Size, shapes, colours â?? the words I wrote in my notebook were more than inadequate. Shopworn, hollow, scrawny, flaccid. It was as though I were in a place for which I had no language. At the time, I turned to paint. I could not capture the bergs and the sea with the vocabulary I had at hand. Watercolour and brush â?? my hand and eye â?? allowed me at least to converse with them. We sailed on to the Canadian high Arctic, changing route several times because of dangerous sea ice. "Five years later I returned. There were two alarming changes: more bergs in Disco Bay; the sea ice in Lancaster Sound was gone. After this trip I made a series of paintings of the spring melt in Kingston. As the paintings progressed I superimposed text. I imagined that the words had been frozen into the ice. As the ice melted, the words for this book appeared.

"Water is everywhere, a reality hard to miss, here in Kingston, where Lake Ontario narrows to the St. Lawrence River. Water defines the city and the whole region. We travel beside our lake and across our rivers. We live across the causeway or near the wetlands. Some of us occupy nearby islands. The rough backcountry to the north is a marvel of lakes and rivers. While we register seasonal changes and are struck by the harvest moon appearing to rise right out of the depths of the Bateau Channel, itâ??s fair to say that most of us take our waterscape for granted. However, as global forces seek to designate water a commodity, we are beginning to sense the peril. We begin to come to our senses. We need to hurry. Our country is teeming with water, snow and ice. Will it always be?"

Joanne Page's profile page

A central figure in contemporary poetry and one of the most iconoclastic figures in Galician and European literature, Chus Pato's sixth book, m-Tala, broke the poetic mould in 2000. Hordes of Writing, the third text in her projected pentology Method, received the 2008 Spanish Critics' Prize for Galician Poetry, and the Losada Di?guez literary prize in 2009. Pato continues to refashion the way we think of the possibilities of poetic text, of words, bodies, political and literary space, and of the construction of ourselves as individual, community, nation, world. She brings us face to face with the traumas and migrations of Europe, with writing itself, and the possibility (or not) of poetry accounting for our animal selves. Secession is Pato's ninth book and her fourth to be translated into English.

Montreal poet Erín Moure has published seventeen books of poetry in English and Galician/English, and thirteen volumes of poetry translated from French, Spanish, Galician and Portuguese into English, by poets such as Andr's Ajens, Nicole Brossard, Rosala de Castro, Louise Dupr?, and Fernando Pessoa. Her work has received the Governor General's Award, the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, the A.M. Klein Prize, and has been a three-time finalist for the Griffin Prize. Moure is currently revising the bilingual French/English impossible play Kapusta, a sequel to The Unmemntioable, for publication in 2015, and is translating Chus Pato's Carne de Leviatan into English as Flesh of Leviathan, to appear in 2016. She is also working on a new book of poems called The Elements, and on a translation of Wilson Bueno's Mar Paraguayo.

Erín Moure's profile page