brick booksfall 2010

CONTACT INFORMATION

35 years & going strong

Publishing new and established voices in Canadian Poetry since 1975

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

BRICK BOOKS431 Boler Road, Box 20081London, Ontario N6K 4G6email / brick.books@sympatico.cawebsite / www.brickbooks.ca

LitDistCo / orders@litdistco.ca100 Armstrong Ave., Georgetown ON, L7G 5S4phone • 1-800-591-6250 / fax • 1-800-591-6251

Small Press Distribution / spd@spdbooks.org1341 Seventh St., Berkeley, CA / 94710-1409phone • 1-510-524-1668 / fax • 1-800-869-7553

EXAMINATION & REVIEW COPIES

ORDERS & DISTRIBUTION

SALES REPRESENTATION / CANADA & THE UNITED STATES

Literary Press Group of Canada501-192 Spadina Ave. Toronto ON, M5T 2C2phone • 416-483-1321 / fax • 416-483-2510info@lpg.ca / www.lpg.ca

It won’t work because nobody reads poetry.

It won’t work because, no matter how hard you wish, Aphrodite is not going to move in with Red Green.

It won’t work because they once filled out a Canada Council form giving themselves titles like Grand Vizier, Poohbah of Publicity and Most Excellent Gofer, and received a sharp reply suggesting they grow up…

It won’t work because although Simone Weil is right to say that attention is really prayer, Jack Spicer is also right to say that nonsense is true friendship.

It won’t work because the kitchen table made most of the decisions, because others were consummated in canoes, cars, rivers and while rhapsodically drunk, and because they’ve lost the kitchen table.

…it won’t work because nobody reads poetry, did I mention that, because…

it is difficult to sing a simple song though god likes simple things, it won’t work because although it cannot fly the heart is an excellent clamberer, because nobody has time to listen and relisten until the music clears its throat, it won’t

work for twenty-five years fuelled on dumb luck and love, just

take my word for it,

it won’t.

3

It won’t work.Recently another publisher asked me how Brick Books functions, and with my usual boyish enthusiasm, I attempted to give him a rundown of our little multi-editor, coast-to-coast, consensual, decentred, anarcho-syndicalist non-corporation. When I had finished there was a slight pause. Then he looked across at me and said succinctly, That Won’t Work. And thinking about this later, I realized that I agreed with him. It won’t work.

The following is excerpted from a talk prepared by Don McKay on the occasion of the 25th anniversary celebration of Brick Books at Harbourfront Centre, Toronto in 2001. We offer it again now in stubborn celebration of our 35th:

Brick Books is the only publishing company in Canada that exclusively publishes poetry. Founded in 1975 in London, Ontario by Stan Dragland and Don McKay, the press continues its dedication to fostering interesting, ambitious and compelling work by both new and established poets, and continues its commitment to deeply engaged editing.

With editors scattered across the country, production, printing and distribution located in Toronto, and administration in London, Ontario, Brick Books is a unique publishing organization that works.

Return From ErebusJulia McCarthy

august

ISBN-13: 978-1-894078-78-8ISBN-1-894078-78-0

$19.00 6 x 8.75 inches / 112 pagestrade paperback / poetry

Erebus, the dark and shadowy outer realm of the Underworld in Greek mythology, becomes a place of transition and becoming in Julia McCarthy’s Return from Erebus. The poems articulate this darkness with such skill that it appears to be made of light; they explore the richness of being, the ephemeral nature of our experience, and its inherent grief, where ‘jays smash like blue china/flung into the trees/and fly away mending them-selves’ and you ‘hear rain and the river/the sound of water walking on itself again.’

frontlist / fall 2010

promotional plans

• launch in Halifax at St. Mary’s University • Readings in Toronto, Waterloo, Ottawa, and the Maritimes• national review copy mailing & advertisements in selected

literary magazines

Julia McCarthy was born in Toronto and has lived in Alaska, Georgia, South Africa, and Norway. Her first book, Stormthrower, was pub-lished by Wolsak & Wynn in 2002. She has worked at many jobs, including bookstore clerk, library assistant, potter and bead maker, and freelance writer/editor. She lives in rural Nova Scotia, about an hour outside Halifax.

5

Poems

that map

the mythic

dimensions

of the

ordinary

with fluent,

quiet

urgency.

“It’s immediately evident when you start reading this collection that these poems are testimonies to a poet who can straddle internal/external realities with complete eloquence. There’s a mental/spiritual acuteness running through these poems, an awareness that is keen and highly developed, both in terms of language and the fierce depth of vision. These poems take the reader through a multitude of experiences that are centred viscerally in the spirit, and its reactions to the universe. Intuition and art combine to bring evocative and graceful language to fruition on every page. McCarthy’s voice is authoritative and subtle, rich with the resonances of lived experiences that are actualized, and laid out before the reader in a superb embodiment of attentiveness. Reading this book makes me ecstatic about poetry.”

–Don Domanski

That Other Beauty

ISBN-13: 978-1-894078-80-1ISBN-10: 1-894078-80-2

$19.006 x 8.75 inches / 80 pagestrade paperback / poetry

In her debut collection, Karen Enns’ focus is the beauty present to us in almost every moment, however mundane or apparently lost. Her argument is that the act of attention itself is the most fundamental of these beauties.

And when the rooms were bare and windowless,and the winds came with their black rain and the darkness

and the coats on nails like frameless men,the pockets hollow-mouthed, I wanted this:

to see the shape of things completely,every darkness, every rise and fall, small breath. – from “Confession”

That Other Beauty ranges across memories of a farm childhood, and further back, to the Mennonite exodus from Russia. We encounter immi-grants, furnace repairmen and grocers, dead cats, a raven lifting into “the clear, bright density of rain.” Enns meditates on Bach, on solitude, and on exile both accidental and imposed, weaving darkness and light with great fidelity and authority.

Karen Enns

promotional plans

• launch in Victoria• readings in Winnipeg, Toronto, London and Niagara-on-

the-Lake• national review copy mailing & advertisements in selected

literary magazines

Karen Enns is from southern Ontario, where she was born and raised in a Mennonite farm community. Her poetry has appeared in jour-nals and magazines across Canada. She lives in Victoria, B.C.

7september

“Karen Enns is a gift to what I can only call song, an offering to ‘the wide open mouth of the heart.’ ” – Patrick Lane

An

exquisitely

musical and

meditative

new

voice in

Canadian

poetry.

frontlist / fall 2010

The Fetch

ISBN-13: 978-1-894078-82-5ISBN-10: 1-894078-82-9

$19.006 x 8.75 inches / 104 pagestrade paperback / poetry

october

Drawing on family recollections, interviews with elders and exten-sive research in archives and regional museums, The Fetch, Nico Rogers’ first book, is a brilliant hybrid—neither a novel nor a collection of short stories. This compelling volume of tales and prose poems contains a broad range of characters. There is the slow-witted girl who has lost her mother and now has only the cow named Fatty for a friend; the hard-bitten captain of a schooner in recoil from the ways of his alcoholic father; the child born pre-mature, swaddled in olive oil-soaked linen, placed in a pan and incubated in an oven. And so on, twenty-eight vignettes in all, all tightly written and highly evocative of outport Newfoundland before Confederation. Funny, tragic, and just.

Nico Rogers

promotional plans

• launch in Toronto• readings in Edmonton, Winnipeg, St. John’s• national review copy mailing & advertisements in

selected literary magazines

Nico Rogers is a storyteller and performance artist, and has ap-peared at writing and folk festivals across the country, as well as on TV and radio. He has taught writing and literature in post-secondary institutions in Ottawa, Winnipeg, and Edmonton and now lives in Toronto, where he is working on a novel which will be a thematic continuation of The Fetch.

9

A book of

voices arising

out of the lives

of people

who

populated

outport

Newfoundland.

frontlist / fall 2010

“…In death, as in birth, we are rushed out of a salt-water belly and dropped into the hands of a stranger…” – from “The Guts”

spring 2010

From the former Poet Laureate of Halifax, poems of deep loss and questioning, wringing beauty out of potential despair. Lost Gospels confirms Neilsen Glenn as a poet of maturity and power.

These astute, generous poems give us a glimpse of contemporary Beirut—in all its ravaged and incongruent beauty—from the perspective of a Westerner who lives and works there.

“These are beautiful poems: questing and mysterious, hopeful and fierce. Joseph’s craft and attention, her choice of the perfect word, give a kind of holiness to the song of everyday life...” – Patricia Young

The Good News about Armageddon executes a rare balancing act: poetry that is at once angry and open, big-hearted and heart-sick, sharply satirical about our contemporary way of living and genuinely sorrowing.

backlist /

Lorri Neilsen Glenn Antony Di Nardo

Steve McOrmondEve Joseph

lost gospels alien, correspondent

the good news about armageddonthe secret signature of things

ISBN-13: 978-1894078-77-1 • $19.00

ISBN-13: 978-1-894078-81-8 • $19.00

ISBN-13: 978-1-894078-79-5 • $19.00

ISBN-13: 978-1-894078-83-2 • $19.00

10 11

Hooked is seven poems about seven famous or infamous women: Myra Hindley, Unity Mitford, Zelda Fitzgerald, Dora Carrington, Carson McCullers, Jane Bowles, and Elizabeth Smart. An elegant

and sinister collection of dramatic monologues.

In Hymn, his ninth collection of poetry, John Barton documents the path of the male body in an increasingly unstable, supposedly tolerant contemporary world. Hymn stokes the fires of homoerotic

romantic love with its polar extremes of intimacy and solitude.

With delicious ironies, innovative and edgy music, radiant self-awareness and scrupulous candour, Chris Hutchinson’s poems negotiate and renegotiate the shifting no-man’s-land between self and others, introspection and public life.

Fiercely elegiac, jaggedly sexual, Michael Kenyon’s The Last House stands on the brink of devastation—personal, ancestral, cultural. These are poems of deep and disturbing vision, clear-eyed, un-

flinching amid the wreckage of their loves.

“At times whimsical, at times wistful, always wakeful, in Cadsby’s intelligent and mature voice, Mimico Creek hums at the core of this extended aubade to this murmurous, anxious city.” - Dionne Brand

Heather Cadsby

Carolyn Smarthooked

hymn

other people’s lives

the last house night work: the sawchuk poems

could be

Chris Hutchinson

Michael Kenyon Randall Maggs

John Barton

featured backlist /

12 13

Winner of the 2008 Winterset Award, the 2009 E.J. Pratt Poetry Prize, and the Kobzar Literary Award. Poems that inhabit the ex-ploits and agonies of Terry Sawchuk, one of hockey’s greatest goal-ies. “This may be the truest hockey book ever written. It reaches a level untouched by conventional sports literature... His Sawchuk is real.” –Stephen Brunt, Globe and Mail columnist

ISBN-13: 978-1-894078-73-3 / 2009 / $19.00

ISBN-13: 978-1-894078-76-4 / 2009 / $19.00

ISBN-13: 978-1-894078-69-6 / 2009 / $19.00

ISBN-13: 978-1-894078-62-7 / 2008 / $20.00 ISBN-13: 978-1-894078-74-0 / 2009 / $19.00

ISBN-13: 978-1-894078-75-7 / 2009 / $19.00

The poems of Botero’s Beautiful Horses are charged with otherness, bright with the exhilaration and danger of transformation. Many are descriptions of surrealist canvases, astonishingly kinetic nar-ratives. The book becomes a journey away from the familiar into other cultures, especially Latin American.

botero’s beautiful horsesJan Conn

ISBN-13: 978-1-894078-71-9 / 2009 / $19.00

Barry Dempsterlove outlandish

Dempster undoes all the clichés that have barnacled our love lives and, with the zest and courage typical of his work, explores their torrents and eddies afresh. A love affair chronicled (from obsession to heartbreak, foolhardiness to faith), this is a book to relish for its

energy and cherish for its wisdom.

ISBN-13: 978-1-894078-70-2 / 2009 / $19.00

selected books in print /

Avison, Margaret Avison, Margaret Avison, MargaretBarton, JohnBenning, SheriBowling, TimCadsby, HeatherConn, JanConn, JanCrate, JoanCrate, Joan

Crummey, MichaelCurnoe, GregDempster, BarryDempster, Barry

Dempster, BarryDi Nardo, AntonyDomanski, DonDonlan, JohnDonlan, JohnDragland, Stan, ed.Dumont, MarilynEnnis, JohnEnnis, John, Randall Maggs, and Stephanie McKenzie, eds.Enns, KarenGoyette, SueGoyette, SueHall, PhilHall, Phil Hall, PhilHumphreys, HelenHumphreys, Helen

Humphreys, HelenHutchinson, ChrisJoseph, EveKenyon, MichaelKenyon, MichaelKenyon, Michael

Klar, BarbaraKroetsch, RobertLee, DennisLee, DennisLeifso, BrendaMaggs, Randall McCarthy, JuliaMcInnis, NadineMcOrmond, SteveNeilsen Glenn, LorriNeilsen Glenn, LorriO’Meara, DavidO’Meara, DavidOndaatje, MichaelPage, P.K.Price, StevenReaney, JamesRogers, NicoSeymour, DavidSimić, Goran

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

978-0-894078-24-5978-0-88999-428-7978-0-88999-619-9978-1-894078-76-4978-1-894078-60-3978-1-894078-34-4978-1-894078-73-3978-1-894078-71-9978-1-894078-48-1978-1-894078-19-1978-0-919626-43-0

978-0-919626-95-9978-0-919626-78-2978-1-894078-42-9978-0-919626-64-5

978-1-894078-70-2978-1-894078-79-5978-1-894078-58-0978-0-919626-45-4978-1-894078-63-4978-1-894078-10-8978-0-919626-76-8978-0-9730945-4-1978-1-894078-83-2

978-1-894078-80-1978-0-919626-99-7978-1-894078-33-7978-0-919626-42-3978-1-894078-44-3978-1-894078-11-5978-1-894078-02-3978-0-919626-47-8

978-0-919626-83-6978-1-894078-75-7978-1-894078-81-8978-1-894078-74-0978-0-919626-48-5978-1-894078-41-2

978-1-894078-67-2978-0-919626-11-9978-0-919626-65-2978-0-919626-81-2978-1-894078-64-1978-1-894078-62-7 978-1-894078-78-8978-1-894078-59-7978-0-9540281-6-9978-1-894078-55-9978-1-894078-77-1978-1-894078-68-9978-1-894078-30-6978-0-919626-55-3978-0-919626-72-0978-1-894078-51-1978-1-894078-43-6978-1-894078-82-5978-1-894078-45-0978-1-894078-28-3

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

Concrete and Wild Carrot / $15.00No Time / $9.95Not Yet but Still / $12.95Hymn / $19.00Thin Moon Psalm / $18.00The Memory Orchard / $16.00Could be / $19.00Botero’s Beautiful Horses / $19.00Jaguar Rain: the Margaret Mee Poems / $18.00Foreign 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 / $14.00Goldcrest Falling / $15.00The Echoing Years: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry and Translation from Canada and Ireland / $50.00That Other Beauty / $19.00The True Names of Birds / $14.00Undone / $16.00Amanuensis / $9.95An Oak Hutch / $17.00Trouble Sleeping / $14.00Anthem / $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 / $19.00Rack of Lamb / $9.95The Sutler / $17.00

Cypress / $18.00The Ledger / $10.00Riffs / $11.95Riffs (large print edition) / $14.00Daughters of Men / $18.00Night Work: The Sawchuk Poems / $20.00Return From Erebus / $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 / $14.00Anatomy of Keys / $18.00Souwesto Home / $17.00The Fetch / $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 / $14.00When Earth Leaps Up / $18.00Woodshedding / $18.00Going Around with Bachelors / $21.00Robinson’s Crossing / $16.00Songs for Relinquishing the Earth / $15.00

14 15

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.