The Shunning 'tears heads off cliches, making us see a whole place freshly. It is a complete world, reeling and tilting but enduring. A fine book, full of bone and muscle. A totality.' Christopher Wiseman, Books in Canada 'The Shumnning shuns easy answers and offers a complex vision of lives in all their contradictions. It's a powerful, humane and moving book.' Douglas Barbour, Toronto Star.

The Shunning

Literature & Fiction

Friesen, Patrick

Poetry

Turnstone Pr

Unearthly Horses

Turnstone Press

Set firmly at the end of the millennium, A Broken Bowl takes on the burden of history, with its heaped atrocities, its unimaginable sufferings. This long poem is an angry lament, a summoning of fragments, a meditation in the midst of an exhausted world. By turns lyric, satiric, elegiac and incantatory, A Broken Bowl is filled with passionate elemental writing in the tradition of Howl and Crow. "Picture-building poetry doesn't get better than this. Patrick Friesen communicates directly to your imagination. These fragments of a broken bowl are, indeed, much greater than the sum of their parts as they spur imaginal encounters not only with Friesen but with the scattered bits of the reader's self - each piece a new gesture to try on." -- Per Brask. "These are the end days - someone's got a kitchen knife and is 'looking for the government' the river is a 'filthy transfusion.' Patrick Friesen sings this dark song with beauty and a guttering love. We're long past apology, reconstruction: there's only Friesen's voice not nearly enough, sure, but the only thing worthy of trust." -- Tim Lilburn. NOMINATED for the 1997 Governor General's Award for Poetry.

A Broken Bowl

Brick Books

Product Description 
Poetry. Spanning a quarter century of Friesen's work, the poems in OUTLASTING THE WEATHER speak to what is meant by "a life lived in poetry." The poems in this selected are inseparable from the poet. To read them is to enter his thinking and ride his breath: to experience the art of making in as immediate a way as is humanly possible. This collection rejects wisdom; rather it is infused with the kind of knowing that comes from having weathered many seasons yet still remaining open to wonder. Memory, its fallibility, and its insistence on uncovering not one truth, but many, is a thread that runs throughout this book. Sometimes it is unclear whose memories we are reading: those of the poet or our own. These poems are archaeological digs through layers of a life lived without the certainty of belief. 
 About the Author 
Patrick Friesen writes poetry, essays, drama, scripts, songs, and text for dance and music. The author of over a dozen books of poetry, Friesen has also collaborated with various musicians, including Big Dave McLean, Cate Friesen, and Marilyn Lerner, and with choreographers/dancers Margie Gillis, Stephanie Ballard, and Ruth Cansfield. Friesen also teaches, part-time, as an instrucor in the Writing Department at the University of Victoria. He is the author of the poetry collections OUTLASTING THE WEATHER: SELECTED & NEW POEMS 1994-2020 (Anvil Press, 2020), 
jumping in the asylum (Quattro Books, 2011), and A DARK BOAT (Anvil Press, 2012). Formerly of Winnipeg, Friesen now lives in Brentwood Bay on Vancouver Island.

Outlasting the Weather: Selected & New Poems 1994-2020

Anvil Press

Reckoning

The story of one man struggling to express his personal views within a society that demands conformity.Peter is trying to live a good life, a faithful life. When he begins to question the doctrine of his Mennonite church and his faith in general, he is ostracized from the community. A decree by the church forces his wife to abandon him if not in person, then in spirit. The strain of domestic and community pressures forces Peter deeper into isolation, but he still refuses to stop questioning. Integrating dance, text and tragedy, The Shunning blends movement and spoken word that will carry you through a sea of emotions.

The Shunning: The Play (Scirocco Drama)

Dramas & Plays

Scirocco Drama

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Books by Friesen, Patrick