Guernica Editions

Has a poet ever had not one but two collections featured on CBC's seasonal list of poetry collections to watch for? Joseph A. Dandurand now has for his books I Will Be Corrupted and The East Side of It All.

https://www.cbc.ca/books/37-canadian-poetry-collections-to-watch-for-in-fall-2020-1.5716100

The Maynard | VIEWS | Short-form Shout Out SWOON . Elana Wolff (Guernica Editions, 2020) by Jami Macarty, The Maynard Co-founder & Editor Though there are two definitions for “swoon,” Elana Wolff’s SWOON is not of the “fainting” or “faint of heart” kind. Wolff’s SWOON is of the enraptured kind. So, not the noun, but the verb! Here is a poet, enraptured with life and the manifest powers of the elements, of humans, flora, and fauna: “no matter the weather or presence. Bird, squirrel, person, / cat.” The poet is also enraptured with the workings of her mind (read: thinking) and the development of her artistry. Her engagement with books, music, and art informs the subject of several poems within the collection. All this to say, Wolff’s is an impassioned, engaged poetry. Wolff orients the reader to the foci of her “swoon” via four epigraphs, ranging from Genesis 24:64 to Victorian era poet, Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Robert Walser’s, THE WALK to Franz Kafka. Kafka’s words: “swooning counts as believing” just may get to the crux of the swoon Wolff has in the mind and heart for her poems. The collection begins in grey spring and in the water element and ends in colorful winter and in the fire element. The cycles of the seasons, the elements, and the movement from greys to blues and reds on the palette, runs parallel to the movement of a woman’s sexual and reproductive life. Gestation, birth, motherhood, and becoming a grandmother mark another cycle the poems clock. That grey spring, “grey and animate / the image,” seems to indicate a grief or depression, particular perhaps to motherhood: “coursing like a mom,” “like a very troubled mom.” Though the specifics remain private, the reader is included in the grieving process and the melancholia felt. I’m not sure I’ve come across a more beautiful and apt description of the split of self under the “greys” of grief and depression than this: “I think this is a piece of mind un- / moored in the ether.” Nor a more beautiful, resulting plaintive: “don’t know why the brain won’t put it back.” The poet reveals herself to be “just as mutable… / … / at the verge, / / compulsively adjusting” as the ones haunting her, the reader included. Even while the skies and mood are grey in the poems, the poet recalls, “Rainbows,” “glint,” and “solar / third-eye light.” Eventually, “rays break through the grey.” And, encounters with birds, trees, and others are welcomed as “messengers,” sent, in Rumi’s words, “as a guide from beyond” ("The Guest House"). As the light breaks through, it brings with it a synesthesia of colour and sound: “colour of curative music.” The colour and song is that of birds, “Goldfinch” and “Red Bird,” and that of flowers in the garden and hues in paintings. The collection contains a series of ekphrastic poems “written for” the works of the studio artists of the Women’s Art Association of Canada (WAAC). The “for” in “written for” indicates an integral gesture of dedication and devotion within and reaching out from the poems—not only to the WAAC artists and their artwork, but also to everything and everyone else, including strangers and artists encountered such as Kafka, who appears throughout, C.D. Wright, William Carlos Williams, and Pieter Brueghel's “Fall of Icarus.” Each encounter amounts to “slender indications, / faith.” Yes, this is a poet, courageous enough to say she has faith. In other words, Wolff’s courageous enough in her poems to ward off destructive cynicism. This is a poet aware that “Definitions are often what we want, / / yet we can't force clearness, / let alone accord.” Even with that two-pronged awareness of uncertainty, the poet is still courageous enough to declare her desire rather than to judge it. These poems are definitely feminine and feminist: “Call it sense for survival, if you like, / / I call it cunning: I like the femininity of that word, / its verbal noun-ness.” Another point of generosity comes from Wolff sharing with the reader aspects of her poetics: “Is it / / the verb that does the big work? as some poets hold…” The reader also gets a sense of the poet's use of ellipses, caesura, and metrical feet. The collection itself, of course, is an expression of Wolff’s poetics, but in a specific way. Her SWOON is among the only books of poetry I can remember reading in the last couple of years (that's more than 300) that doesn't have sections. That non-cordoning gesture is one of the things I really like about this book; it allows for connections via association and metonym from poem to poem. As well as being an expression of Wolff’s poetics, that is also perhaps indicative of her belief of what life is—a cycle of interconnectedness, where the “tree becomes a mirror.” Within the poems, there are several expressions of threes and twos, e.g. “Dyads,” “Diptych.” Along with a twoness of relationship and in books, there’s a welcoming of the duality of being—that of the experiencer and the observer: “We’ve been living with two selves all along— / the one we’re slowly getting to know & the witnessing one: becoming.” Reader, read SWOON, and witness a person and a poet “at the crux of wonderment.” #TheMaynard #TMViewsSeries #TMreview #TMShortformShoutout #TMcontributors #TMFall2016 #TMFall2017 #TMarchive #GuernicaEditions #poetry #readpoetry Guernica Editions Elana Wolff See Less

https://www.facebook.com/maynardpoetry/photos/a.1210757769007814/3356399511110285

Read Issue Volume 15, No. 1 (Spring 2020) of Journal of Italian Translation (page 71). Lisa Pike was born and raised in Windsor, Ontario. She completed her M.A. in English & Creative Writing at the University of Windsor, and her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and Women & Gender Studies at the University of Toronto. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies: Re: Generations: Canadian Women Poets in Conversation, ditch, the poetry that matters, CV2, The Writer’s Block, The New Quarterly, and Whisky Sour City. She is the author of a poetry chapbook, Policeman’s Alley. She lives in Toronto and is presently working on a second novel.

http://userhome.brooklyn.cuny.edu/bonaffini/jit/JIT27-1.pdf

The English fiction category of the Ottawa Book Awards is awarded for outstanding published works of fiction including novels, short stories, children’s literature and poetry. The title poem of this collection takes us on an epic journey across past and present historical events and through spaces defined by the natural sciences, as it explores the challenges of being human in these troubled times. It is accompanied by a gathering of shorter poems that confront the dark forces in our world as they struggle for the light at the end of the tunnel. In stark imagery, these poems turn words into music to celebrate the anguish and the glory of being alive. Henry Beissel is a poet, playwright, fiction writer, translator and editor, with 44 books published. Among his 22 collections of poetry are his epic Seasons of Blood and the lyrical Stones to Harvest as well as his celebration of Canada in Cantos North and the 364 haiku in What if Zen Gardens …, a finalist for the 2018 Ottawa Book Awards. He lives in Ottawa with his wife Arlette Francière, the literary translator and artist.

https://ottawa.ca/en/arts-heritage-and-events/ottawa-book-awards#2020-finalists

A tale of a Kwantlen man who has been given the gift of healing but also is a heroin addict living on the eastside, what drove the author to write this book of poems was how the voice of the Healer came to him and it was with ease that each poem showed itself. It was if he were right there either talking to a Sasquatch or crawling down an alley on the eastside of Vancouver. It almost has a film quality to it as if each poem is a scene from an epic tale. This is a book of hope, loss, and hopefully a sense of redemption for all the poor souls who find themselves on the street and lost from where they truly come from. (From Guernica Editions) Joseph A. Dandurand is a poet from the Kwantlen First Nation. His other collections include The Rumour and SH:LAM (The Doctor). He was the Vancouver Public Library's 2019 Indigenous storyteller in residence.

https://www.cbc.ca/books/i-will-be-corrupted-1.5723543

"As the author is a psychoanalyst, you get a sense of the deeper psychological impact that this family has on the world, and vice-versa. Katz has a marvelous way of intertwining history, character, place, and fiction. She is a talented writer who puts her stamp on the baby boom generation in a way that is interesting to learn, eclectic, easy to understand, and most of all, entertaining. Her passage of comparing San Francisco to Mecca is enough to hook you. You're in for an emotional ride. But don't think that the author sugar-coats the baby boom generation. There are some hard realities here too; some of them eye-opening."

https://www.readerviews.com/reviewkatzsideeffects