Press News
2009-10 Releases: Knife in the Head (Suicide by Morphine and Paris Green)
Short fiction by Mark Anthony Jarman
"Knife in the Head is a story loaded with Jarman's irrepressible prose,
a high-wire act that takes the old Canadian west and rockets away
with stylistic fervour. Jarman bends the sentence to unexpected places,
lets the sentence molt and metamorphose;
his short fiction is the enemy of the dull, and this story builds on his usual rocket-launching-pad of a writer's desk." - Shane Neilson
Road Trips
Short fiction by Rebecca Rosenblum
"In Road Trips, Rebecca Rosenblum asks,
'What do we take with us when we go on the road?'
Her answer: 'ourselves.'
These stories of personal complication, of muddied motivations
and eclipsing loves, are driven by dialogue.
Destinations loom, but aren't reached; characters travel
an emotional distance; things change, are broken
and are in the process of being saved.
The only resolution is self-knowledge,
and knowledge of the passenger." - Shane Neilson
The Book of Widows
Contemporary Canadian Poets: volume 6
new poetry by M.Travis Lane
wood engravings by George A.Walker
"Travis Lane has crafted a book comprised of grief: the first half
is devoted to grieving myths, taking famous widows and their kicking sorrows; the second half is visceral grief, the poet's own,
focusing on the death of her husband and its aftermath.
This is a morbid collection in the best sense: funereal and felt, a resigned protest against what can't be fought, the inevitability of all things returning to poetry." -Shane Neilson
Sea Legend
New poetry by Mark Callanan
"Mark Callanan has written a nautical tale bent by poet's logic, replete with Newfoundland's beauty but also its mystery: the mystery of woman, the mystery of mermaid, the mystery of night, of death, of shipwrecks and conch shell music that seems to agelessly speak to us. Callanan has written poems that issue imagery into seamless universe: his poems are of the sea, capable of a great sympathy (for a giant squid exhibit, for example) and also a terrible power. And he sees the sea in us: that squid-watcher, who happens to be you, ends up "watching your reflection in the glass." But theme is secondary to the skill with language: Callanan has his eye on reader's, not sailor's, delight."- Shane Neilson.
Sea Legend was shortlisted for
the 2010 bpNichol Chapbook Award
Reviewed by Carmine Starnino on theVehicule Press blog
on June 16, 2010 and by Dan Wells on the Canadian Notes
and Queries blog on March 24, 2010.
Approaches to Poetry: the pre-poem moment (anthology)
edited & introduced by Shane Neilson
with essays and poems by twenty-seven authors
(see catalogue for a complete list of authors).
"The origin of poetry is presumed to be song;
but what is the origin of the poem?
This anthology attempts to explain the origins of the original poems by asking 27 poets to create a dialogue with a favourite poem (their own)
in the form of an essay. The poets were given free rein in answering; some were short and sharp, others ranged further, thinking of the essay as an opportunity to discover the means of poetry, how biography and image and the right words render themselves into the poem.
The results are sometimes essayistic and sometimes indivisible from their poetic origins. Poets can be as various as reaching back to
Robert Browning, sideways to the heteronym, or forward to the process of revision. Each of the poets surprised themselves as they trawled
their consciousness, discovering not just the elements of their poems, but their process." - Shane Neilson
Approaches to Poetry - Review in ARC 64, Summer 2010
by Barbara Myers (pp.114-115), an excerpt:
“The poems serve the book as premises, in the sense that each poet chose one poem to focus on as a way to describe craft and influence in his or her work, so that it becomes the essay’s raison d’etre. In this rich assembly of voices, the poets consider “where did this poem come from” more than “how did I go about writing poem X” - and the reader is frequently taken by surprise - and delight.... What I like about poets talking poetry is the intimacy of the conversation, even in print...
From the various essays, we draw impressions of poetic ego and humility in the way writers speak of their craft. We are given fascinating discussions of the pros and cons of working in form, and we get stories, great stories."
Learning to Dance with a Peg Leg:
three dozen tunes for a third mate
Contemporary Canadian Poets: volume 5
poems by Wayne Clifford
drawings by MJ Edwards
"The age is not conducive to love poetry; poets aren't doing it anymore, it is as if they are rebelling against that most natural of modes, or, at least, poets out of their adolescence seem to distrust it. So, to start off with, I appreciate the genre. Secondly, I love several of the poems
in this small collection. I especially love the shorter lyrics;
they seem to articulate the word "love" without mentioning it,
they are quick direct sorties to the heart, they make me yearn.
These are clearly love poems of experience." - Shane Neilson
Oneiric
poems by Nyla Matuk
etchings by George Raab
"Part netherworld, part playground of the possible, part dizzying rush, part wordscape, Nyla Matuk is a maker: her poems chide the stuff of dreams according to an internal logic, a lyric experimentation.This is a poetry with definition, with realization, with what I call “capture”:
the jumping off point of the image, the lateral move into encapsulation, the recourse to joy.This is emphatically not an anecdote-did-what collection; Oneiric is about the mix and contiguousness of meaning
and meaninglessness, of skew, of metaphor, of how things cohere
and dehisce...." - Shane Neilson
Reviewed by Robert Earl Stewart in
The Mansfield Revue - "The Monthly Revues - August 2009".
Forthcoming in 2010-2011
Looking for Tito
Short stories by Goran Simic
"My short stories I see as weird fairy tales about everyday life in which nobody knows if circumstances will twist your life." - Goran Simic
"In Looking for Tito, Goran Simic has written short tales
all revolving around an enigmatic character, the personage of Tito, purposely named to echo the former Yugoslav potentate, but in these stories a character who can be strange, who can be in pain.
Tito has various guises, eventually -and threateningly- in Simic's prose adding up to the visage of all of us." - Shane Neilson
Due September-October 2010
their blue drowning
Poetry by Dean Steadman
Paintings by Francoise Steadman
"The poems in this collection examine a couple's relationship as they move through courtship, marriage, separation and reconciliation.
Each of the poems is accompanied by a parallel prose text and together the two genres unfold the same narrative but from the different perspectives that poetry and prose offer." - Dean Steadman
"Dean Steadman has written a beautiful love story,
mythic in proportion, that offsets lyric poetry with complementary prose narrative. Each individual poem enhances its prose partner,
and we follow a pair of lovers as they fall, as they stay, and as they are estranged. The story arc is simple, but the craft is not, and Steadman's debut - he has not published in book form before - is remarkable in its lyric poise, in its statings and in its discretions." - Shane Neilson
Due December 2010
Exhibition Catalogue
Poetry by Claire Sharpe
In the letter accompanying her submission, Claire Sharpe wrote:
"Please find attached the current work in progress, provisionally entitled 'Exhibition Catalogue.' The idea behind it is to try
to encourage people to perhaps look at a poem
in a similar manner to the way in which they might consider
a piece of abstract art,
and without a firmly declared reference or image to rely on."
Due January 2011
Please see the catalogue section
for earlier releases
Books we like
FIELD HOSPITAL: The Last Writings of
Lt. Colonel John McCrae
Shane Neilson, author - Frances Hunter, designer (JackPine, 2010)
FOR AND AGAINST by Sharon McCartney (Goose Lane, 2010)
PATTERNICITY by Jim Johnstone (Nightwood Editions, 2010)
WANDERLUST, a graphic novel by Megan Speers (The Porcupine's Quill, 2010) 2010)
Where & How to Buy Our Books:
BOOKSELLERS, LIBRAIRIES, LIBRARY SERVICE COMPANIES: Order directly from the Press using the interactive form on the Orders page or by mailing or faxing your purchase order or use our printable Order form. If you prefer to use your credit card, please choose the PayPal option.
INDIVIDUALS / SUBSCRIBERS: Please use the PayPal buttons attached to each of the books in the Catalogue section or see Orders.
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