The Porcupinity of the Stars
- Publisher
- Coach House Books
- Initial publish date
- Oct 2010
- Category
- Canadian
-
Paperback / softback
- ISBN
- 9781552452356
- Publish Date
- Oct 2010
- List Price
- $16.95
-
eBook
- ISBN
- 9781770562738
- Publish Date
- Oct 2010
- List Price
- $9.99
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Description
Poet and musician Gary Barwin both continues and extends the alchemical collision of language, imaginative flight and quiet beauty that have made him unique among contemporary poets. As the Utne Reader has noted, what makes this work so compelling is 'Barwin’s balance of melancholy with wide-eyed wonder.' The Porcupinity of the Stars sees the always bemused and wistful poet reaching into new and deeper territory, addressing the joys and vagaries of perception in poems touching on family, loss, wonder and the shifting, often perplexing nature of consciousness. His Heisenbergian sensibility honed to a fine edge, the poems in this bright, bold and acutely visual book add a surreptitious intensity and wry maturity to Barwin’s trademark gifts for subtle humour, solemn delight, compassion and invention.
'Between the freaky, funny filmmaker Guy Maddin and author Gary Barwin, Canada is producing some of the most innovative creative works of our time.' – Utne Reader
About the author
Gary Barwin is a writer, composer, and performer. He is the author of numerous books and chapbooks of poetry and fiction including the poetry collections frogments from the frag pool: haiku after basho (written with derek beaulieu) and Raising Eyebrows and Outside the Hat (Coach House Books) and the fiction collections Doctor Weep and other strange teeth, Big Red Baby (The Mercury Press), and Cruelty to Fabulous Animals (Moonstone Press). He is the author of The Mud Game, a novel written with Stuart Ross (The Mercury Press). Barwin is also the author of several books for children including Seeing Stars, a young adult novel (Stoddart Kids) nominated for an Arthur Ellis Award and the CLA YA Book of the Year, and Killer Poodle Made Me Island King (Fox Meadow), co-winner of the Muskoka Novel Marathon 2003. Barwin received a PhD in Music Composition and currently teaches music at Hillfield-Strathallan College and creative writing at McMaster University. Barwin lives in Hamilton, where he has cultivated vague but colourful illusions about his writing. Please don’t tell him.
Other titles by
Scandal at the Alphorn Factory
New and Selected Short Fiction
Imagining Imagining
Essays on Language, Identity and Infinity
duck eats yeast, quacks, explodes; man loses eye
The Most Charming Creatures
Poems
Bird Arsonist
Laurier Poetry Pack #5
Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted
The Ballad of Motl the Cowboy
Laurier Poetry Pack #4
Wilfrid Laurier University Press
For It Is a Pleasure and a Surprise to Breathe
New and Selected Poems
