Poetry, Stories, Ideas, and Imagination
by Deborah Carla Eker and Glen Barry Eker
Better break out your sledgehammer -- it's time for a little concrete! Concrete poetry, that is. Concrete what? Well, it's poetry that's a lot like art -- its meaning comes from what it looks like instead of the order of the words, so it's full of great visual puns and word puzzles. And one of its foremost practitioners is bpNichol, one of Canada's best experimental writers. Konfessions of an Elizabethan Fan Dancer is Nichol's very first book. Originally published in England by Bob Cobbing in 19...
The Tangled Cedaring Sublime & Its Knotting Into Nothing of Time
by Richard William Kirkpatrick-Thorne
Mad Long Emotion wants to talk flora to fauna like you. It talks by dancing, as bumblebees do. In its dances, loosestrife shoos humans away, green carnations flirt with handsome men beyond the shade, and "dogbanes though dead bloom." Meanwhile, in better-discerned motion, numerous species both spiny and spineless prove invasive, from Great Lake lampreys to hydraulic triceratopses. But they're just looking for better homes. The book concludes with a long poem about distance, desire and the diffic...
The city, at once benevolent and indifferent to its residents, is the inspiration for this debut collection of poetry. In the first poem, a young woman arrives in the big city, feeling anonymous and wondering what her life there will bring. The poet builds upon the arrival to develop urban themes of anonymity and collectivity alongside individualist themes of freedom, loneliness, and growing self-identity. Part private reflection, part love letter to the metropolis, the poems pull back the curta...
The dark and surreal take form in the poems of this collection, shifting between humor and horror even while exploring the everyday world—or the everyday as it appears to be. The poet brings the familiar into a different light, revealing the strangeness of what the reader thinks they know, while at other times fully embracing the absurd and fantastic. From the usual thrills and mystery of murder, infidelity, and suicide, the poems also take on shapeshifters, six-legged dogs, fallen cities, and s...