Biography & Autobiography Personal Memoirs
Soft Zipper
Objects, Food, Rooms
- Publisher
- New Star Books
- Initial publish date
- Mar 2021
- Category
- Personal Memoirs, General, General
-
Paperback / softback
- ISBN
- 9781554201723
- Publish Date
- Mar 2021
- List Price
- $19.00
-
eBook
- ISBN
- 9781554201730
- Publish Date
- Mar 2021
- List Price
- $9.99 USD
Add it to your shelf
Where to buy it
Description
This engaging memoir relates stories about George Bowering's small-town BC upbringing and his parents — his father long dead and his mother more recently passed on at the age of 100 — while at the same time honouring the author's other "parents": Gertrude Stein, Charles Olson, and Roland Barthes.
Borrowing a structure and some precepts about writing from Stein, Bowering remains true to his inimitable self, relating his recollections and observations, his ever-curious mind travelling across the decades as he recounts some of the objects, food, rooms, and people that have shaped his engagement with the world. Charles Olson's ideas about proprioception shape Bowering's approach to himself as "an object among objects" (and, with increasing age and frailty, even one containing numerous objects), while Roland Barthes's writing strategies also make themselves felt throughout.
But these stories wear their learning lightly — it's ridiculously easy to enjoy these wise and gentle reminiscences of an older writer who spent his childhood in sunny South Okanagan, without even noticing the carefully wrought structure.
Lisa Robertson (The Baudelaire Fractal, The Weather, Cinema of the Present, 3 Summers, &c.), herself a student of George Bowering, provides an introduction to this deceptively simple and richly rewarding work by an old master.
About the author
George Bowering, Canada’s first Poet Laureate, was born in the Okanagan Valley.After serving as an aerial photographer in the Royal Canadian Air Force, Bowering earned a BA in English and an MA in history at the University of British Columbia, where he became one of the co-founders of the avant-garde poetry magazine TISH. He has taught literature at the University of Calgary, the University of Western Ontario, and Simon Fraser University, and he continues to act as a Canadian literary ambassador at international conferences and readings.A distinguished novelist, poet, editor, professor, historian, and tireless supporter of fellow writers, Bowering has authored more than eighty books, including works of poetry, fiction, autobiography, biography, and youth fiction. His writing has been translated into French, Spanish, Italian, German, Chinese, and Romanian.Talon has published Bowering’s Taking Measures, a collection of serial poems.Bowering has twice won the Governor General’s Award, Canada’s top literary prize.
Other titles by
Good Morning Poems
a start to the day from famous English-language poets
Could Be
New Poems
Writing and Reading
Essays
Taking Measures
Selected Serial Poems
if wants to be the same as is
Essential Poems of David Bromige
No One
Some End / West Broadway
10 Women
A Short Sad Book
The Dad Dialogues
A Correspondence on Fatherhood (and the Universe)