The Fine Print: Poetry Tra La (1 of 2)

Gary Barwin

Poet and musician Gary Barwin 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.

Linda Besner

The Id Kid is a book about appetites. Linda Besner’s addiction to linguistic play leads to uncommonly beautiful poems: by turns sassy and sumptuous, sparkling with mischief, and marked by deep feeling. There seems little Besner won’t try. Crammed with tall tales, off-colour jokes and cockamamie theories, omnivorousness is her only rule as though she couldn’t bear to exclude anything or anyone. And the result– imaginatively abundant and formally audacious– is one of the most arresting poetry debuts in recent memory.

Asa Boxer

The poems in Skullduggery, the new book from Asa Boxer (The Mechanical Bird), have a simple warning: trust nothing. Like the book’s hilarious final poem, which recasts Canada’s discovery as a hoax from the Middle Ages– Boxer transforms shortfalls of perception into tour-de-force performances. Drawing on a deepened range of forms (comic set-pieces, verse-plays, dramatic monologues) Skullduggery embraces deception as both theme and tactic. In poem after poem, encounters test the threshold of what’s real and what’s not; turns of phrase appear to say one thing, but really mean another.

George Elliott Clarke

Red joins George Elliott Clarke's previous 'colouring' books– Blue (2001) and Black (2006)– with poems that mix the candid sexuality of pre-Christian Rome with the pop sentimentality of Italian screen scores of the 1960s and 70s, drenching readers in the brute violence of Titus Andronicus, the reflections of Malcolm X and the music of Charles Mingus (whose 'bass sounds like a typewriter / Punctuating Ulysses'). Whether he situates his reader in his father's Halifax cab, on a beach in Rhodes or in front of Alma Duncan's painting Young Black Girl, Clarke is every sensitive to 'the hard work of words / The even harder work of love.'

Helen Guri and Sean Howard will also be presenting their books Match and Incitements (respectively). Their information is found on page 2.