brick bOOkS · forms: there are erasure poems, prose poems, lists, found poems, laments, ... A Newfoundland Songbook (University PG 5PSPOUP 1SFTT SFQSJOUFE

brick

bOOkS

Fall 2016

Publishing new and established voices in Canadian poetry since 1975

Brick cat Fall 2016_3pp.indd 3 16-05-24 10:59 AM

2

SEPTEMBER

ISBN: 978-1-77131-442-8 6 X 8.75 INCHES / 128 PAGESTRADE PAPERBACK / POETRY / $20

PROMOTIONAL PLANS•• Readings in Vancouver, Victoria, Red Deer, Calgary, Edmonton,

Regina, Saskatoon, Montreal, St. John’s, Halifax.


3

ANGELINE SCHELLENBERG Linked poems that uncover the ache and whimsy

of raising children on the autism spectrum.

Through public judgments, detouring dreams and unspoken prayers, Tell Them It Was Mozart, Angeline Schellenberg’s debut collection, traces both a slow bonding and the emergence of a defiant humour. This is a book that keens and cherishes, a work full of the earthiness and transcendence of

forms: there are erasure poems, prose poems, lists, found poems, laments, odes, monologues and dialogues in the voices of the children, even an oulipo that deconstructs the DSM definition of autism. Tell Them It Was Mozart is bracing in its honesty, healing in its jubilance.

Michelangelo slept in his clothes and seldom ate Newton lectured to empty rooms at scheduled times if no one showed up to hear him . . . Only staying where room numbers were divisible by three, Tesla tested turbines in his mind, would not touch round objects . . . Charles Darwin formulated the theory of natural selection, the foundation for our understanding of the diversity of life on earth: advantageous traits survive Mozart meowed on tables —from “Posthumously diagnosed”

ANGELINE SCHELLENBERG’s poetry has appeared in Prairie Fire, CV2, TNQ, Rhubarb, Room, Geez, Wordgathering, Lemon Hound and The Society, as well as in anthologies. Her poetry won third prize in the 2014 Banff Centre Bliss Carman Poetry Award Contest and was shortlisted for Arc Poetry Magazine

Praise for TELL THEM IT WAS MOZART:

“By turns, Angeline Schellenberg's words are blunt, musical, unflinching, transcendent. Her speaker raises two children on the autism spectrum, but she is never a martyr, never a victim, never a saint. Schellenberg has drawn

a woman who turns the experience inside out . . .” —Kimmy Beach

Tell Them It Was Mozart


4

SEPTEMBER

ISBN: 978-1-77131-445-96 X 8.75 INCHES / 72 PAGESTRADE PAPERBACK / POETRY / $20

PROMOTIONAL PLANS• Launch in Edmonton. •

Kingston.


5

A long poem that limns the incremental mourning of living with a person who has frontotemporal dementia.

Selah, from Psalms and Habakkuk — to praise, to lift up, to weigh in the balances, to pause, or a purely musical notation. Biblical scholars debate the exact meaning. Selah, Nora Gould’s second poetry collection, is a sequence of fragments written in dialogue with all of these meanings. Stitched together, these fragments form a poem that runs from the ranch land of Alberta into the heart of a shared house and a shared life.

Selah is about living with a husband recently diagnosed with dementia; it’s about the looking back and the imagining forward, about saying what cannot be said — the wayfaring bush and its shadow. It’s about finding a way through all this: “The palette darker than I’d planned,” yes, but also shot through with humour and care, crafted with both frankness and decorum.

I see my love more clearly from a distanceof marriage as if riding after freezing rain:/ muscles tensed to lift me in the saddle.” In many ways this book is that ride. It pares away anything that does not immediately, albeit subtly, get to the aching muscle of the matter. NORA GOULD writes from east central Alberta where she ranches with her family. She graduated from the University of Guelph in 1984 with a degree in veterinary medicine. Her debut poetry collection, I see my love more clearly from a distance (Brick Books, 2012), was winner of the 2013 Robert Kroetsch Edmonton Book Prize and the Stephan G. Stephansson

Gerald Lampert Memorial Award and was a finalist in the Poetry category for the High Plains Book Awards.

Praise for SELAH:

“This poem never slips into sentimentality but it breaks the heart. The

appearing against the snow, they leave their marks on you like hard work scars the hands. I love them.” —Lorna Crozier

NORA GOULDSelah


6

OCTOBER

ISBN: 978-1-77131-448-0 7 X 8.75 INCHES / 104 PAGESTRADE PAPERBACK / POETRY / $20

PROMOTIONAL PLANS• Launch in Halifax. •

Toronto, Victoria, Vancouver, Nelson, Prince George.


7

GENEVIEVE LEHRA powerful grief book—

poems that are not so much elegiac as visionary.

Stomata, Genevieve Lehr’s second collection, asks that language shoulder loss, that it reach out centrifugally, at full metaphorical stretch, calling upon all its narrative and lyric resources to be adequate to human tragedy. These losses include immediate deaths, Alzheimer’s, abuse, cancer and—in a remarkable poem—residential schools, and they activate a potent spirituality that calls on a full range of imagistic resources.

As a grief book, Stomatait honours and remembers the lost, it is always charged with a sense of a mystic power deriving from them. “In a conversation between Homer and Hermes, loss was found to be a gift,” writes Lehr. The result is the poetic experience of a vitalistic universe in which “Metamorphosis is everywhere”: a

being struck by a simultaneity of mundane and cosmic, as can be seen in the first lines of her opening long poem: “In the latter half of the third quarter of the waning moon / I sit at the table drinking tea.”

This is a book that is constantly provocative, alive with spirit and a restless energy in the face of disaster.

Born in Newfoundland, GENEVIEVE LEHR has lived and worked as an ESL teacher coast to coast in Canada. She lives in Halifax. Her poetry has been published in many literary journals, both in Canada and abroad. She is the editor of Come And I Will Sing You: A Newfoundland Songbook (University

The Design of Wings (Running the Goat Press, St. John’s NL, 2004), and her debut collection was The Sorrowing House (Brick Books, 2004).

Praise for STOMATA’s opening long poem:

“. . . One can return again and again . . . and still discover new insights. The range of reference is wide and surprising—Nâzim Hikmet, Bobbie Gentry, Milarepa, St. Francis—the language dissociative, the rhythms often raw and out of order. There's something elevated, germinal, fascinating here.”

—Jury Citation from The Malahat Review

Stomata


8

SPRING 2016 TITLES

DISTURBING THE BUDDHA Barry Dempster $20 / 978-1-77131-433-6

A beloved poet explores why life can be so rich, even at the worst of times. Disturbing the Buddha, Barry

conversational and, like the best conversations, it moves between reverence and irreverence, sincerity and irony as it grapples with love, loss, loneliness and simple lack of luck. “Few if any poets encompass the range, the

dynamism, and the spectrum of emotional colours Barry Dempster does . . .” —Chalmers Award Jury Citation

BARRY DEMPSTER, twice nominated for the Governor General’s Award,

Excellence in the Arts, and in 2014 he was nominated for the Trillium Award for his novel The Outside World. He lives in Holland Landing, Ontario.

APRÈS SATIE – FOR TWO AND FOUR HANDSDean Steadman$20 / 978-1-77131-436-7

Poems that echo Satie’s haunting music and refract the ironies of the Parisian Dada movement. By turns tender, wry, playful and fierce, Dean Steadman’s second collection uses surreal imagery, recurring characters and cyclical themes to evoke the artistic and intellectual temperament of Paris during Satie’s most creative years.

DEAN STEADMAN’s work has been widely published in Canadian journals Pith and Wry: Canadian Poetry (Scrivener

Press, 2010). He was a finalist in the 2011 Ottawa Book Awards and has lived in Ottawa for most of his life.


9

SPRING 2016 TITLES

MEDITATIO PLACENTAEMonty Reid$20 / 978-1-77131-439-8

A wide-ranging meditation by an accomplished poet on the uncontainable materiality of the world. From

trucks to lost socks to the products of conception, Meditatio Placentae, Monty Reid’s twelfth collection, is a book about unruly stuff. Stuff that functions but also stuff that exceeds, stuff that dreams.

MONTY REID was born in Saskatchewan, worked for many years in Alberta, and now lives in Ottawa. He has won Alberta’s Stephan G. Stephansson Award for Poetry on three occasions, the Lampman Award, National Magazine

currently the Managing Editor for Arc Poetry Magazine and Festival Director at VerseFest, Ottawa’s international poetry festival.

HEAVEN’S THIEVESSue Sinclair$20 / 978-1-77131-430-5

Lyric poems built with consummate skill by a poet at the peak of her powers. “In Heaven’s Thieves, Sue

and fearless, Sinclair’s poems live, think, and feel, by and in matter, about things that matter. Sinclair’s book,

that is, informs, in the fullest sense. And equally, dazzles.” —Jane Hirshfield

SUE SINCLAIR is the author of four previous collections, all of them nominated for regional and/or national awards. In 2013 she served as the

and is now based in Fredericton, where she writes, edits and teaches creative writing at the University of New Brunswick.


10

BRICK BOOKSCLASSICS

NEW EDITIONS OF OUR MOST POPULAR TITLES

Robert Bringhurst. Each deluxe redesign includes both a new introduction written by an esteemed Canadian poet or scholar and an afterword in which the author takes a moment to contextualize and reflect on the composition and legacy of their book. Another look at some of our foundational texts.

Griffin Award–winner Carson’s first poetry collection. Introduction by Margaret Christakos, brand new “Short Talk on Afterwords” by Carson.

1 B&W ILLUSTRATION

ANNE CARSON

SHORT TALKS BRICK BOOKS CLASSICS 1

off Newfoundland’s northern shore. A seminal book by Canada’s former Poet Laureate. Introduction by Adrian Fowler, new afterword by Steffler.

2 B&W ILLUSTRATIONS

JOHN STEFFLER

THE GREY ISLANDS BRICK BOOKS CLASSICS 2


11

The story of a passionate love affair, told in vintage Lee style—with whoops, deep chords, and headlong improvisational arcs. Introduction by Paul Vermeersch

2 B&W ILLUSTRATIONS

DENNIS LEE

RIFFS BRICK BOOKS CLASSICS 3

A fierce, honest account of what it takes to grow into one’s self and one’s Métis heritage in the face of institutional and cultural obstacles. Introduction by Lee Maracle, new afterword by Dumont.

MARILYN DUMONT

A REALLY GOOD BROWN GIRL BRICK BOOKS CLASSICS 4

Crummey retells and reimagines his father’s and others’ stories of outport Newfoundland and the Labrador fishery.

author Lisa Moore, affectionate afterword by Crummey.

MICHAEL CRUMMEY

HARD LIGHT BRICK BOOKS CLASSICS 5

changes to the original text and layout of this important early work. Comprehensive new introduction by poet

JAN ZWICKY

WITTGENSTEIN ELEGIESBRICK BOOKS CLASSICS 6


12

“Somewhere between the directness and clarity of haiku and

hauntingly candid explorations of the hard truths of growing old . . .”—from the Griffin Poetry Prize judges’ citation

978-1-926829-88-3 / $20

Elegantly translated by Canadian collaborators Brask and Friesen, these dreamlike poems by a celebrated Danish poet zoom in and out of places and states of mind, from a lit bicycle shed in the back yard to a root canal in November, from a typhoon in Hong Kong to instincts astray in various Copenhagen neigbourhoods.978-1-77131-376-6 / $20

A hymn to a beloved lake and a reflection on how a place comes to inhabit us even as we inhabit it. “. . . intense simplicities that praise all we have lost, all we have left. Read her and then in deep quiet read her again.” —Patrick Lane978-1-926829-87-6 / $20

Arleen Paré

BLUE SONOMA

FRAYED OPUS FOR STRINGS & WIND INSTRUMENTS

LAKE OF TWO MOUNTAINS

Ulrikka S. GernesTranslated by Per Brask & Patrick Friesen

Jane Munro

FEATURED BACKLIST / AWARD WINNERS AND NOMINEES


13

978-1-926829-74-6 / $19

Julie BruckMONKEY RANCH

Karen SolieSHORT HAUL ENGINE

978-1-894078-17-7 / $14

FEATURED BACKLIST / AWARD WINNERS AND NOMINEES

978-1-894078-58-0 / $18

978-1-894078-00-9 / $15

Don Domanski

Jan Zwicky

ALL OUR WONDER UNAVENGED

SONGS FOR RELINQUISHING THE EARTH


14

SELECTED BOOKS IN PRINT /

Concrete and Wild Carrot / $No Time / $Not Yet but Still / $Hymn / $19.00A Page from The Wonders of Life on Earth / $19.00The End of Travel / $14.00Monkey Ranch / $19.00The Woman Downstairs/ $Placeholder / $20.00Short Talks (BB Classics 1) / $20.00 When This World Comes to an End / $20.00Botero’s Beautiful Horses / $19.00Edge Effects / $19.00A Walker in the City / $19.00Monologue Dogs / $20.00 Slovenly Love / $Pale as Real Ladies: Poems for Pauline Johnson / $14.00Hard Light / $20.00Deeds/Abstracts / $The Burning Alphabet / $17.00Disturbing the Buddha / $20.00Invisible Dogs / $20.00Love Outlandish / $19.00Alien, Correspondent / $19.00Roaming Charges / $20.00All Our Wonder Unavenged / $18.00Bite Down Little Whisper / $20.00Spirit Engine / $18.00New Life in Dark Seas / $16.00A Really Good Brown Girl (BB Classics 4) / $20.00Ordinary Hours / $20.00That Other Beauty / $19.00Frayed Opus for Strings & Wind Instruments / $20.00 The Rapids / $19.00I see my love more clearly from a distance / $19.00Selah / $20.00outskirts / $19.00The True Names of Birds / $14.00Undone / $16.00The Lost Letters / $20.00The Banquet of Donny & Ari: Scenes from the Opera / $20.00Amanuensis / $An Oak Hutch / $17.00Trouble Sleeping / $14.00Anthem / $14.00Nuns Looking Anxious, Listening to Radios / $14.00The Ledger / $10.00


15

SELECTED BOOKS IN PRINT /

Brick Books acknowledges the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit for their support of our publishing program.

FOR A FULL TITLE LISTING AND MORE INFORMATION ON BRICK BOOKS, VISIT OUR WEBSITE AT WWW.BRICKBOOKS.CA.

Riffs (BB Classics 3) / $20.00 Stomata / $20.00 The Fleece Era / $20.00Night Work: The Sawchuk Poems / $20.00Between Dusk and Night / $19.00The Good News About Armageddon / $19.00Everything, now / $19.00Blue Sonoma / $20.00Lost Gospels / $19.00Noble Gas, Penny Black / $18.00Elimination Dance / $10.00Hologram: A Book of Glosas / $14.00Lake of Two Mountains / $20.00Anatomy of Keys / $18.00Omens in the Year of the Ox / $19.00Souwesto Home / $17.00Afloat/ $20.00Meditatio Placentae / $20.00

Rogers, Nico The Fetch / $19.00 9781771314428 Schellenberg, Angeline Tell Them It Was Mozart / $20.009781926829678 Scowcroft, Ann The Truth of Houses / $19.00

Inter Alia / $17.00The Family China / $20.00Breaker / $18.00Heaven’s Thieves / $20.00Mortal Arguments / $Secrets of Weather & Hope / $14.00Careen / $20.00 Hooked: seven poems / $19.00The Way to Come Home / $Modern and Normal / $17.00Short Haul Engine / $14.00This World We Invented / $20.00Après Satie – For Two and Four Hands / $20.00The Grey Islands (BB Classics 2) / $20.00Girlwood / $19.00When Earth Leaps Up / $18.00Karyotype / $20.00 Going Around with Bachelors / $21.00Robinson’s Crossing / $16.00Songs for Relinquishing the Earth / $Wittgenstein Elegies (BB Classics 6) / $20.00


CONTACT INFORMATION

For course adoptions, review copies, or permission to reprint poems from Brick Books’ titles in anthologies, journals, etc., please contact Brick Books directly.

BRICK BOOKS 431 Boler Road, Box 20081London, Ontario N6K 4G6email / [email protected] / www.brickbooks.ca

EXAMINATION & REVIEW COPIES

SALES REPRESENTATION

CANADA

UNITED STATES

LitDistCo / [email protected]/o Fraser Direct, 8300 Lawson Rd., Milton ON, L9T 0A4

our website: www.brickbooks.ca

Small Press Distribution / [email protected]

Canadian Manda Group664 Annette StreetToronto ON, M6S 2C8

Literary Press Group of Canada

[email protected] / www.lpg.ca

ORDERS & DISTRIBUTION

E-BOOKS


Documents

brick bOOkS · forms: there are erasure poems, prose poems, lists, found poems, laments, ... A Newfoundland Songbook (University PG 5PSPOUP 1SFTT SFQSJOUFE