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Brick Books431 Boler Road, Box 20081London, Ontario N6K 4G6email / brick.books@sympatico.cawebsite / www.brickbooks.ca

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booksbrick SPRInG 2012Publishing new and established voices in Canadian Poetry since 1975

February

ISBN-13 • 978-1-926829-76-0ISBN -10 • 1-926829-76-X

$ 19.00 6 x 8.75 iNchEs / 96 pAgEsTrAdE pApErbAck / poETry

froNTlisT / SPRInG 2012

Omens, curses,

the reading

of entrails:

means of

grappling

with what

is out of

our hands,

beyond our

ken.

Steven PriceSteven Price’s second collection, Omens in the Year of the Ox, is part of a long-lived struggle to address the mysteries that both surround and inhabit us. The book draws together moments both contemporary and historical, ranging from Herodotus to Augustine of Hippo, from a North American childhood to Greek mythology; indeed, the collection is threaded with interjections from a Greek-style chorus of clever-minded, mischievous be-ings—half-ghost, half-muse—whose commentaries tormentingly egg the writer on. In poems that range from free verse to prose to formal construc-tions, Price addresses the moral lack in the human heart and the labour of living with such a heart. Yet the Hopkins-like, sonorous beauty of the lan-guage reveals “grace and the idea of grace everywhere, in spite of what we do.” The pleasures of Price’s musicality permeate confrontation with even the darkest of human moments; the poems thus surreptitiously remind us that to confront our own darkness is one of the divine acts of which humans are capable.

promoTionAl plAns• launch in Victoria• readings in Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Toronto,

Halifax and Montreal• Festival of Words in Moose Jaw in July 2012

Steven Price’s first collection of poetry, Anatomy of Keys (Brick Books, 2006), won the Gerald Lampert Award and was named a Globe and Mail Book of the Year. His first novel, Into that Darkness (Thomas Allen), was published in 2011. His work has been translated into several languages, including German, French, and Hungarian. He teaches writing at the University of Victoria.

3

“There is a poetic adroitness here so knowing that it often hits you only afterward how deliciously chosen each syllable has been... [Price’s] technique allows him frequently to achieve what all artists dream of: the virtual disappearance from our awareness of the subtle technical intricacies that are unfolding there... it must have felt like this when TS Eliot came on the scene.” - The Globe & Mail (on Anatomy of Keys)

OMENS IN THE YEAR OF THE Ox

Comic

and sober

by turns,

these poems

ask us

what is

sufficient,

what will

suffice?

What is sufficient, what will suffice? … a mandrill, a middle-aged woman, a shattered Baghdad neighbourhood, a long marriage, even a spoon, grap-ple with this unanswerable conundrum—sometimes with rage, or plain persistence, sometimes with the furious joy of a dog who gets to ride with his head through a truck’s passenger window. Monkey Ranch, Julie Bruck’s third book of poetry, is a brilliant and unusual blend of pathos and play, of deep seriousness and wildly veering humour. Though Bruck “does not stammer when it’s time to speak up,” and “will not blink when it’s time to stare directly at the uncomfortable,” as Cornelius Eady says in his blurb for the book, “in Monkey Ranch she celebrates more than she sighs, and she smartly avoids the shallow trap of mere indignation by infusing her lines with bright, nimble turns, the small, yet indelible detail. Bruck sees every-thing we do; she just seems to see it wiser. Her poems sing and roil with everything complicated and joyous we human monkeys are.”

• launch in San Francisco• author appearance at AWP in Chicago 2012• readings in Oakland, Toronto, Montreal and tour of Atlantic

Canada

Julie Bruck is the author of two previous books, The End of Travel (1999), and The Woman Downstairs (1993). Her recent work has appeared in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Maisonneuve, The Malahat Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review and The Walrus, among other publications. A Montreal native, she lives in San Francisco with her husband and daughter, and two enormous, geriatric goldfish.

“Monkey Ranch has all the antic sensuality and thrilling precision we’ve come to expect from Julie Bruck’s work. This volume has a pitch-perfect elegance that calms the ruckus just long enough for us to glimpse the vulnerability of everyone involved. Monkey Ranch is like the best sort of letter from a friend—full of gossip, lively observation, and serious wit.” – Sharon Thesen

MArch

ISBN-13 • 978-1-926829-74-6ISBN -10 • 1-926829-74-3

$ 19.00 6 x 8.75 iNchEs / 88 pAgEsTrAdE pApErbAck / poETry

froNTlisT / SPRInG 2012

Julie Bruck

promoTionAl plAns

5

mONKEY RANCH

In Nora Gould’s one-of-a-kind debut, I see my love more clearly from a dis-tance, the Prairie itself is a central character: muse, mythic persona, the place of deepest solace and of deepest questioning. The poems focus with great firmness and technical command on the facts of daily life on the farm: impregnating cows, the neighbour kid picking off a coyote, cutting hay, get-ting water to the herd in a drought, dehorning. But Prairie anecdotalism this ain’t. What is breathtaking about this book is the relation between its exactness of observation and the grief, horror, and beauty that it docu-ments. What the voice achieves, in its very gestures, is a kind of transcend-ence: not with the purpose of avoiding pain, but in order to make all of it—all of it—seeable and feelable by a human being.

“Fear,” as Gould says “resides in anticipation and in the afterwards, the what-might-have-been and the badger of again.” In the white light of the now, there is no room for it, there is room only for concentration, a precise surgical rendering of details, so that we may sense everything else—the unspeakable—disposing itself in the space around that blaze of attention.

• launch in Edmonton• readings in Saint John NB, Saskatoon, Eastend SK,

Calgary, Red Deer, Banff and Victoria • Edmonton Poetry Festival in April 2012

Nora Gould writes from east central Alberta where she ranches with her family and volunteers in wildlife rehabilitation with the Medicine River Wildlife Centre. She graduated from the University of Guelph with a degree in veterinary medicine.

“Uninterested in simplistic lyrical escape, [Gould] can be as dry as a wheat field without rain, as rich as the biopsy of a cancer cell, complete with fallen fruit and pickle-making… I see my love more clearly from a distance is a fresh way of looking at what’s not always regarded, a journal of intensity lived – tough and ambrosial – the land as it is when recorded by a fearless voice.” – Brian Brett

April

ISBN-13 • 978-1-926829-75-3ISBN -10 • 1-926829-75-1

$ 19.00 6 x 8.75 iNchEs / 104 pAgEsTrAdE pApErbAck / poETry

froNTlisT / SPRInG 2012

Nora Gould

7

I SEE MY LOVE MORE CLEARLY FROM A DISTANCE

promoTionAl plAns

Unromantic

poems

examining life,

love, illness,

and death

on a ranch

on the

hard grass

prairie.

Poems with

an urgent

desire to

discover a

way to be in

right relation

to other

creatures and

to the earth

itself.

There are many journeys encompassed in the pages of this mature and well-crafted first collection; literal travels to different parts of the world, to Europe and Africa, are the outward manifestation of the inward quest, the asking of the old but still essential questions: What is real? What is true? What is honourable? What is right? Yet these questions are new in that the poet is deeply concerned with the need to find a new paradigm, a new way to relate to the earth at this time of ever-heightening environmental crisis. And this seeking for how to be in and of the earth is paralleled by a personal search for intimacy with her fellow humans—with friends and lovers, with a grandfather, with the people she encounters as she ventures into uneasy relationships with people from other cultures.

Throughout the collection, McGiffin never forgets that we are also animals, that we are as vulnerable at twilight, in “the wolfish light,” as any other creature struggling to complete its brief sojourn on earth.

• launch in Duncan, BC• readings in Smithers, Victoria, Vancouver, Calgary,

Saskatoon, Winnipeg, Toronto and Whitehorse

Emily McGiffin’s poetry has received awards from the Writer’s Trust of Canada, the Canadian Authors Association and has twice been a finalist for the CBC Literary Awards. She was born and raised on Vancouver Island and currently makes her home in northwest BC where she works for Skeena Watershed Conservation Coalition. Between Dusk and Night is her first book.

“I am undone by Emily McGiffin. Her images and insights both ‘measured and wary’ create an immaculate architecture for the heart. Sometimes I think I’ ll never read a good poem again and then she comes along with a book full of them. Astonishing.” – Patrick Lane

mAy

ISBN-13 • 978-1-926829-73-9ISBN -10 • 1-926829-73-5

$ 19.00 6 x 8.75 iNchEs / 76 pAgEsTrAdE pApErbAck / poETry

froNTlisT / SPRInG 2012

Emily McGiffin

promoTionAl plAns

9

BETWEEn DUSK AND nIGHT

Pierce’s voice can be heard echoing down the long corridors of memory and myth. This debut collection is all lilt and discipline in its courtliness, its surrender to the theatre of the moment.

Acutely angled, filled with intertextual res-onance and wit, Governor General’s Award-winning poet Stephanie Bolster’s fourth col-lection is an ambivalent zoo-tour, an open-eyed meander through a landscape of made and contained things.

E. Alex Pierce

Stephanie Bolster

vox hUMANA

A WALKER IN THE CITY

A PAGE FROM THE WONDERS OF LIFE ON EARTH

ISBN-13 • 978-1-926829-71-5 • $ 19.00

ISBN-13 • 978-1-926829-70-8 • $ 19.00

10

FaLL 2011

In this innovative and arresting narrative poem, Méira Cook’s walker, a young woman, is a character being written by an “old city poet,” who is in turn being written by another poet, for whom the young woman, “Ms. Em Cook,” has been an amanuensis. Always witty and often hilarious, feather-light in touch, the book is an entertaining exploration of serious issues: youth and age; life, death and rebirth; the (dis)connection of language and reality; tradition and the now. It is an assemblage of seven nesting sections, each of them a sort of chapbook speaking to each of the others and rounding out a long poem of great freshness. A Walker in the City is one of a kind, one of the most original books Brick has ever published.

Méira Cook

ISBN-13 • 978-1-926829-72-2 • $ 19.00

11

bAcklisT /

At once wise and achingly at a loss, these poems speak of a familiar inner struggle—for insight, for equanimity, for words with which

we may re-enter life anew.

In Girlwood, Jennifer Still’s poems come of age. Songs of liberation and confinement arise from the tangled pathways between mother and daughter: both cries of devotion and congested laments.

Sharawadji brilliantly makes us aware of language as an instru-ment of discovery. Each of the secret languages of the mind’s

worlds is unearthed and translated with a conjurer’s intensity

Sue Goyette’s outskirts is a tour de force. Its originality lies in Goyette’s refusal of despair, her conviction that the connections among people, their conversation, curiosity, empathy and awe, can help us see a way forward. This book will name you, and frighten you; make you laugh, and arm you for what is to come.

Sue Goyette

THE TRUTH OF HOUSES

Girlwood

SHARAwADJI

OUTSKIRTS

Jennifer Still

Brian Henderson

Ann Scowcroft

ISBN-13: 978-1-926829-68-5 / 2011 / $ 19.00

ISBN-13: 978-1-926829-67-8 / 2011 / $ 19.00

ISBN-13: 978-1-926829-69-2 / 2011 / $ 19.00

ISBN-13: 978-1-926829-66-1 / 2011 / $ 19.00

ANATOMY OF KEYSSteven Price

Steven Price’s Houdini knows better than most the limitations of life, having bent the efforts of a lifetime to transcending them, and having failed. Winner of the 2007 Gerald Lampert Award, and a Globe and Mail top 100 book for 2006.

ISBN-13:978-1-894078-51-1 / 2006 / $ 18.00

12 13

FEATURED bAcklisT /

Erebus, the shadowy outer realm of the Underworld in Greek mythology, becomes a place of transition and becoming as McCarthy subtly and authoritatively maps the mythic dimensions

of the ordinary.

Julia McCarthyRETURN FROm EREBUS

ISBN-13: 978-1-894078-78-8 / 2010 / $ 19.00

Poems that plumb the beauty present to us in almost every mo-ment, however mundane or apparently lost, arguing that the act of attention itself is the most fundamental of these beauties.

THAT OTHER BEAUTYKaren Enns

ISBN-13: 978-1-894078-80-1 / 2010 / $ 19.00

Nico RogersThE FETCh

Family recollections, interviews with elders, and extensive archival research are distilled into a brilliant hybrid—a book of voices

arising out of the lives of people who populated outport Newfoundland.

ISBN-13: 978-1-894078-82-5 / 2010 / $ 19.00

Avison, Margaret Avison, Margaret Avison, MargaretBarton, JohnBolster, Stephanie

Bowling, TimBruck, JulieCadsby, HeatherCarson, AnneConn, JanConn, JanCook, MéiraCook, MéiraCook, MéiraCrate, JoanCrate, Joan

Crummey, MichaelCurnoe, GregDempster, BarryDempster, Barry

Dempster, BarryDi Nardo, AntonyDomanski, DonDonlan, JohnDonlan, JohnDragland, Stan, ed.Dumont, MarilynEnns, KarenGould, Nora

Goyette, SueGoyette, SueGoyette, SueHall, PhilHall, Phil Hall, PhilHenderson, BrianHumphreys, HelenHumphreys, Helen

Humphreys, HelenHutchinson, ChrisJoseph, EveKenyon, Michael

978-0-894078-24-5978-0-88999-428-7978-0-88999-619-9978-1-894078-76-4978-1-926829-70-8

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978-0-919626-83-6978-1-894078-75-7978-1-894078-81-8978-1-894078-74-0

Concrete and Wild Carrot / $15.00No Time / $9.95Not Yet but Still / $12.95Hymn / $19.00A Page from The Wonders of Life on Earth / $19.00The Memory Orchard / $16.00Monkey Ranch / $19.00Could be / $19.00Short Talks / $14.00Botero’s Beautiful Horses / $19.00Jaguar Rain: the Margaret Mee Poems / $18.00A Walker in the City / $19.00Slovenly Love / $15.00Toward a Catalogue of Falling / $12.95Foreign Homes / $15.00Pale as Real Ladies: Poems for Pauline Johnson / $14.00Hard Light / $14.00Deeds/Abstracts / $16.95The Burning Alphabet / $17.00Letters from a Long Illness with the World: the D.H. Lawrence Poems / $14.00Love Outlandish / $ 19.00Alien, Correspondent / $19.00All Our Wonder Unavenged / $18.00Domestic Economy / $9.95Spirit Engine / $18.00New Life in Dark Seas / $16.00A Really Good Brown Girl / $14.00That Other Beauty / $19.00I see my love more clearly from a distance / $19.00outskirts / $19.00The True Names of Birds / $14.00Undone / $16.00Amanuensis / $9.95An Oak Hutch / $17.00Trouble Sleeping / $14.00Sharawadji / $19.00Anthem / $14.00Nuns Looking Anxious, Listening to Radios / $14.00The Perils of Geography / $14.00Other People’s Lives / $19.00The Secret Signature of Things / $19.00The Last House / $19.00

Klar, BarbaraKroetsch, RobertLee, DennisLee, DennisMaggs, Randall McCarthy, JuliaMcGiffin, EmilyMcInnis, NadineMcOrmond, SteveNeilsen Glenn, LorriNeilsen Glenn, LorriO’Meara, DavidO’Meara, DavidOndaatje, MichaelPage, P.K. Pierce, E. AlexPrice, StevenPrice, StevenReaney, JamesRogers, NicoScowcroft, AnnSeymour, DavidSimić, Goran

Sinclair, SueSinclair, SueSinclair, SueSmart, CarolynSmart, CarolynSolie, KarenSolie, KarenSteffler, JohnStill, JenniferSzumigalski, AnneVenart, S.E.Walsh, AgnesZwicky, JanZwicky, Jan

978-1-894078-67-2978-0-919626-11-9978-0-919626-65-2978-0-919626-81-2978-1-894078-62-7 978-1-894078-78-8978-1-926829-73-9978-1-894078-59-7978-1-894078-83-2978-1-894078-55-9978-1-894078-77-1978-1-894078-68-9978-1-894078-30-6978-0-919626-55-3978-0-919626-72-0978-1-926829-71-5978-1-894078-51-1978-1-926829-76-0978-1-894078-43-6978-1-894078-82-5978-1-926829-67-8978-1-894078-45-0978-1-894078-28-3

978-1-894078-66-5978-1-894078-29-0978-1-894078-15-3978-1-894078-69-6978-0-919626-56-0978-1-894078-47-4978-1-894078-17-7978-1-894078-13-9978-1-926829-66-1978-1-894078-52-8978-1-894078-61-0978-1-894078-56-6978-1-894078-37-5978-1-894078-00-9

Cypress / $18.00The Ledger / $10.00Riffs / $11.95Riffs (large print edition) / $14.00Night Work: The Sawchuk Poems / $20.00Return From Erebus / $19.00Between Dusk and Night / $19.00Two Hemispheres / $18.00The Good News About Armageddon / $19.00Combustion / $18.00Lost Gospels / $19.00Noble Gas, Penny Black / $18.00The Vicinity / $15.00Elimination Dance / $10.00Hologram: A Book of Glosas / $14.00Vox Humana / $19.00Anatomy of Keys / $18.00Omens in the Year of the Ox / $19.00Souwesto Home / $17.00The Fetch / $19.00The Truth of Houses / $19.00Inter Alia / $17.00Immigrant Blues; English translations by Amela Simić / $15.00Breaker / $18.00Mortal Arguments / $15.00Secrets of Weather & Hope / $14.00Hooked: seven poems / $19.00The Way to Come Home / $15.00Modern and Normal / $17.00Short Haul Engine / $14.00The Grey Islands / $14.00Girlwood / $19.00When Earth Leaps Up / $18.00Woodshedding / $18.00Going Around with Bachelors / $21.00Robinson’s Crossing / $16.00Songs for Relinquishing the Earth / $15.00

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

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

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SELECTED BOOKS IN PRINT /