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Cantilevered Songs
John Lent

ISBN 978-1-897235-66-9 / trade paper
$16.95 / 64 pages / September 2009

Readers familiar with John Lent’s work will be drawn into Cantilevered Songs by his impressive ability to make poetry useful, not in the sense that it will solve problems, or create codes or alibis for how live. No. Useful in the sense that we all live somewhere, come from somewhere, hear things, see other things, and remember. When we share this with others as writers do, we transform the ordinary. We make it magical; make it important. This is Lent’s gift – to remind us all that we have lives worth thinking about; to remind us that our own backyards, roads home, work, play and love are uncommon wonders. This is what he means when he says: “Play that song. Play it again. Now, improvise,”

Lent’s poetry gains its energy from his own recognition of its usefulness as much as it gains its art from his own experiences with music, art, family friends and the his work as a teacher, musician and writer in the Okanagan. And while it is important to recognize his structured play with visual architecture, to make the poems resemble what they observe, to capture the cadence of those crazy personal mysteries, to hear the backbeat moments of when you catch a big and strange idea sideways and then it disappears, in the end it is the small, but beautiful, epiphany of feeling triumphant for no reason other than you have lived.

"I can think of no Canadian writer who so thoroughly positions us in front of the mirror that might offer us at once both reality and the imagined. It is to Lent that I turn when I need to be reminded, when I need to discover again, how the writer works in the daily world of place while aspiring to what endures.
He is there, the writer writing out of and in the present." — Robert Kroetsch

Other Books by John Lent
So It Won't Go Away
Monet's Garden
The Face In the Garden

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When the World Is Not Our Home
Susan Musgrave

ISBN 978-1-897235-67-6 / trade paper
$16.95 /806 pages / September 2009

When the World is Not Our Home includes nearly fifty poems by one of Canada’s most distinctive literary voices. Selected from titles published between 1985 and 2000, these poems issued in small print runs became quickly out of print and are often now only available through rare book collectors. Part diviner, part sorceress, but always direct, confident and humorous, Susan Musgrave reaffirms readers of her distinctive place in Canadian letters.

“Musgrave approaches her subject in the manner of Salvador Dali — she distorts reality until it approximates her bizarre vision of the world.”
— The Globe and Mail

“Tapping into fears and subconscious yearnings has been Susan Musgrave’s trademark from her earliest work, Songs of the Sea Witch, where she found inspiration and direction in classical and aboriginal mythology. Now she is able to locate the mythic element anywhere, in a death, a ferry ride, a failed photographic expedition, even in reading someone’s else’s collected poems!”
— BC Bookworld

“She casts a spell and haunts us...she is a mythmaker...within her beats a heart that welcomes flooding darkness in which to brew special magic.”
— Montreal Gazette

Other Books by Susan Musgrave
You're In Canada Now ...

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Sally O: In the Betsy Sense of the Word
Charles Noble

ISBN 978-1-897235-68-3 / trade paper
$21.95 / 304 pages / September 2009

In 1978 Press Porcepic published a slim volume by an emerging poet. The collection Haywire Rainbow was described as a collection in which “extravagant and exuberant language, brought together philosophy, emotion and lyricism.” For decades Charles Noble through his writing has wandered beyond the imagination’s limit, sallied from the safe language harbours, revelled in connotative abundance, immersed himself in philosophical phenomena, and earned his place in Canadian poetry.

Strikingly original, explorer, subterranean, and farmer-philosopher are other words that critics have been used to describe Charles Noble and his oeuvre published over the past forty years. An album of his inimitable work from 1972-2007, Sally O is the first retrospective of Noble’s literary expeditions. Enlightened with extensive author notes and commentary, this selected showcases Noble’s ability to be anything but conventional and establishes his presence in the post-modern arguments.

Other Books by Charles Noble
Hearth Wild: post cardiac banff

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Man Reading "Woman Reading In Bath"
John Livingstone Clark

ISBN 978-1-897235-59-1 / trade paper
$15.95 / 80 pages / March 2009

In Man Reading “Woman Reading in Bath”, John Livingstone Clark creates a series of poetic meditations as responses to the work of Anne Szumigalski: specifically the poem entitled “Woman Reading in Bath”, in the book that shares the same name. Clark’s inspiration for this project was a question posed by the elder poet several times in her last few years: “Why do so many of my book titles have water in them?” For Clark, the poem “Woman Reading in Bath” reflects a number of major themes in her work, and by writing individual poems in relation to single lines (occasionally a couplet), the ‘mythopoesis’ of her work could be opened up in a book of poetry. Within this textual framework, Clark’s poems are dominated by the metaphor of a swimmer enveloped in a series of states and environments.
It would be understatement to say that these poems deal with loneliness, aloneness, and that final liminal state one experiences between life and death. The swimmer is a lonely man, but he accepts it as part of the rite of passage we must all make: moving from solid ground and social activity, to the beach with its visionary views, and finally the stage when one actually enters the water and moves out into a seemingly infinite ocean, beneath a tangibly infinite sky.

One of the main reasons Clark chose this poem of Szumigalski’s is its radical, though humorous, deconstruction of all patriarchal theologies. As suggested by the poem’s title, there really is a woman having a nice soak in the tub, but wouldn’t you know it — a Yahweh-like figure pops out of the water and starts throwing his weight around. It is in his responses to these poems that Clark moves into a very specific duel with the hegemony of Patriarchal Christianity.

From the personal to the universal, this collection is an ode to the harmonics of mind, body, and spirit. Why always about water? Characters and Selves within all of us beg to know, the swimmer reciprocates: the body is sixty-five percent H2O; the water breaks at birth; and in the unconscious process of Individuation, we are “drowning to life”.

• Shortlisted for the 2009 Saskatchewan Book Award for
  City of Saskatoon

Other Books by John Livingstone Clark
Poems From A Broken Body

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paperwhite
Catherine Mamo

ISBN 978-1-897235-60-7 / trade paper
$15.95 / 80 pages / March 2009

In Catherine Mamo’s debut poetry collection, is a woman quietly buried, like dormant grass under months of snow, in a routine agenda: make meals, water the cactus, turn the baby, pay the mortgage, and pick up son at 2:00 pm from swimming. However, this poetry hosts an extraordinary, worldly voice that lives beyond the banality of chores, and understands the immensity of origin and coexistence. Whether Mamo is observing the evolution of a hoverfly or is contrasting her picket fence life with a scene of the Ganges “where wild dogs gnaw on charred corpses” she installs a remarkable balance between the concrete and imaginable. Where the mundane blurs and confuses the self, a mother escapes through her poet exoskeleton. Or is she a poet with a mother’s exoskeleton? A woman who wakes in the night holding scribbled notes feels the earth pulsate around her, finds meditation in laundry and snow; in the Ma — the space between.

Paperwhite is sound-rich with hums and chants, where butterflies are harmonic and “coyotes howl like ambulances”, and where a woman stands at the intersection of her life: remembering passed lovers and escaped dangers, searching for mid-life enlightenment, and projecting the loneliness of aging.

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correction line
Dennis Cooley

ISBN 978-1-897235-50-8 / trade paper
$15.95 / 96 pages / September 2008

This powerful and evocative poem sequence reconstructs memory through pinpoint ancestral connections and personal history. The poetry is as fundamental as the southern prairie landscape in its stark realities, and progressively elemental in its distinctive risks with structure and imagery. It is roots poetry, humorous, anecdotal and wise, but also original, unexpected and profound. Cooley’s writing fiddles with forms, swerves among the vernacular, the comical, the meditative, the linguistic, and the personal. His work exudes a strong commitment to local and contemporary understandings of writing and a continued experimentation with his postmodernist leanings. correction line affirms Cooley’s desire to break from the inexorable narrative and offer poetry its place in the everyday world, while allowing its aesthetic to claim the space and time of the Canadian Prairies for its form, cadence and meanings. As the title suggests there are lines that correct what must change, as there are lines to correct what is already known. It is through this convergence of memory and history that Cooley’s poems shape understanding.

“ . . . Cooley being humble Cooley, you can almost never find most of [his] titles listed on his other books; never one to announce himself, but lets the poems do all the talking.” — rob mclennan, Vallum Magazine

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No Apologies for the Weather
Taylor Leedahl

ISBN 978-1-897235-51-5/ trade paper
$12.95 CAD / 64 pages / September 2008

Taylor Leedahl integrates the dynamic traditions of Western Canadian poetry with her evolving pop sensibility, and emerges with a bright and resonant new voice on the literary landscape. Here is a chronology of a girl, then a young woman, coming to age in a contemporary society that allows more psychological, educational, and sexual freedoms than ever before, and her poetic response as she exercises these liberties wherever and whenever she can.

“Taut with energy, these poems compel us to look up and outward — as the ‘blue sun tumbles’ and prairie ‘moon limbo[s]’ under the wide-eyed horizon. Leedahl’s crystalline observations are a 'white rip of truth' in a landscape where flora and fauna, humans and insects are busy ‘making business' of life.” —Mari-Lou Rowley

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Terminal Moraine
Ian LeTourneau

ISBN 978-1-897235-53-9 / trade paper
$12.95 CAD / 64 pages / September 2008

Ian LeTourneau imagines history and memory as a glacial landscape that is both advancing and inert. The result is a collection where metaphor unfurls on a conveyor belt of precise language constructed to assemble the past we pretend not to remember, the future we try not to imagine, and the present we cannot escape. Terminal Moraine announces the arrival of an urgent new voice in Canadian poetry, one that embraces our myriad jagged landscapes, both personal and public, thawing and freezing.

poetry

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To End A Conversation
Kelly-Anne Riess

ISBN 978-1-897235-54-6 / trade paper
$12.95 CAD / 64 pages / September 2008

Kelly-Anne Riess portrays women naked in loneliness and longing. She details our self-destructive nature and our inability to save ourselves once we’ve pursued love’s twisted, and dangerous, paths. But, there remains the indomitable human spirit’s ability to endure and come back for more and Riess’ poems capture that spirit in remarkable ways.

“In the contemporary social-scapes of Kelly-Anne Riess’ poems, paradise got lost a long time ago. Riess’ Eve is closer to Bridget Jones parachuted onto the streets of Regina. These are sly, wry, manic, and determinedly human poems for the new millennium. With a documentary eye and the poetic sensibility of a Jann Arden, Riess writes candidly about getting dumped, getting laid, and getting paid by ‘pasty/bosses with sausage-fat limbs who crumb/creativity like dried bread.’ A sassy debut.” — Jeanette Lynes, author of It’s Hard Being Queen: The Dusty Springfield Poems

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This Is the Nightmare
Adrienne Gruber

ISBN 978-1-897235-52-2; paper;
$12.95 CAD; 64 pages, trade paper; September 2008

This collection is the poet’s quest for exit signs, both mutual and solitary. Or is it an entrance she looks for through the forests of family and love, the changing landscapes of people, the shifting seasons? When nature is at work revealing and recovering, when who you were becomes who you are, there is clarity. These moments are captured as rituals that reveal the disharmony of existence; and the need for encounters with ghosts, both real and ethereal.

“There is sex, death and everything in between, which sums up the Uber Gruber’s poetry. How can she be both cheeky and wise at once? So sweet and sad and good?” — Susan Musgrave

“In poems that are fresh, quirky, poignant, amusing, and always unflinchingly honest, Adrienne Gruber confronts the ambiguities of intimacy and love. Her terrain is the ‘tender navigation’ of feelings for the living and the dead, for lovers, for family, even a beloved dog — in other words, what we find and what we lose as we journey through life.” — Judith Krause

First Mountain
Paulette Dubé

ISBN: 978-1-897235-33-1
$15.95 CAD / 96 pages / trade paper

First Mountain is a interconnected suite of poems about a particular place — Jasper, Alberta. Paulette Dubé has lived there for more than a decade and her keen sense of the area and the healing powers of the natural world — seeking solitude, washing away stress, and celebrating the intimacy that is experienced by living in a pristine environment — shapes the emotional backbone of First Mountain. Dubé is at peak performance in her craft.

Other Books by Paulette Dubé
Gaits
The House Weighs Heavy

I forgot to tell you
jillian harding russell

ISBN: 978-1-897235-34-8
$15.95 CAD / 96 pages / trade paper

The title of this collection carries the urgent suggestion of withheld knowledge or something that has been suppressed but must be told. The poems reach out from the page with this narrative energy while maintaining an ironic weight of understatement. The collection is divided into five sections, each one offering its own collective theme, while together, like the fingers of a hand, combining for greater purpose.
I forgot to tell you guides the reader through a corridor of secrets where the mysterious and the mystical are whispered, then shouted, to move us to the intimacy that Russell shares with us.