CBC BOOKS BEST CANADIAN POETRY BOOKS OF 2022 LONGLISTED FOR THE RAYMOND SOUSTER AWARD hwæt, another Beowulf translation? Not exactly… Welcome to Denmark’s Heorot Hall, where King Hrothgar invites to his banquet table everyone but Grendel, Saxon’s cradle-made monster. Dissing this ur-outsider initiates a predictable and monstrous backlash, a Mediæval fracas that only the eponymous Beowulf can quash. Sailing across the whaleroads, he arrives to “quell and queltch a...
Any translation is a reading. Chris McCully reads Beowulf as an epic written in English using all the complex metrical conventions of its time, as well as distinctive epic tropes including sea-crossings, oracular pronouncements and encounters with the monstrous. This version renders the original in readable contemporary English but also keeps as close as it can to the older, alliterative metrical system, so that readers may experience something of the textures and formal properties of the origin...
"It was dusk, when the dark earth stains the blueing air and soothes bird in tall tree and beast in silent lair; I alone amidst all that hush of soil and leaf prepared for the war of the way and the way's great grief, of which an undistracted heart may speak or sing..." Published to coincide with the 700th anniversary of Dante's death, Ned Denny's baroque, line-by-line reimagining – the follow-up to his Seamus Heaney Prize-winning collection Unearthly Toys – shapes the Divine Comedy into nine...
The second part of Book I of "The Canticles" continues the dialogue -- as dramatic monologues -- of those who fostered the transatlantic slave trade, or who demonized the image of the Negro in the Occident; as well as those who struggled for liberation and/or anti-racism. In this work, Dante can critique Christopher Columbus and Frederick Douglass can upbraid Abraham Lincoln; Elizabeth Barrett Browning can muse on her African racial heritage and its implications for child-bearing, while Karl Mar...
LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD • The winner of Sweden’s most prestigious literary award makes her American debut with an epic, multigenerational novel-in-verse about two Sámi families and their quest to stay together across a century of migration, violence, and colonial trauma. “Crystalline prose that reads like poetry and myth at once. There are intricate layers of beauty and meaning here in sparse clusters across a vast new landscape as I’ve never read before. The music of this book...
In Zanzibar, in 2008, George Elliott Clarke began to write his "Canticles," an epic poem treating the Transatlantic Slave Trade, Imperial and colonial conquest, and the resistance to all these evils. That is the subject of Canticles I (MMXVI) and (MMXVII). In Canticles II (MMXIX) and (MMXX), Clarke rewrites significant scriptures from an oral and "African" or "Africadian" perspective. Now, in Canticles III (MMXXII) and (MMXXIII), Clarke shifts focus—from world history and theology — to the speci...
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (Calla Editions)
by Samuel Coleridge
You're A Badass Streetcar Operator Keep That Shit Up
by White Elephant Novelty Books