Good Morning Heartache

Norris, Ken

Technology of the Sun

Just as for Dante, for whom the image of the beloved gave entrance to a complete imagination of the world, an imago mundi,” the betrayal of a beloved can also shatter the poet’s vision, no matter how elaborately conceived. Such a betrayal can turn the world upside down, where what was loved is now hated, what was benign becomes threatening, what was dangerous is embraced, what was worshipped is murdered, what was past is future. The author is cast adrift, to wander the earth from Tahiti to Prague, from Morocco to Miami, in limbo” in a newly unknown world.Part divorce journal, part travel poem, part meditation on the rudderless denizens of the global village of which the author is merely one, Limbo Road chronicles the search for the new beloved, the one who will lead to the new City of God.” That she appears only in glimpses is a credit to Ken Norris’s adept reading of the late twentieth century, and his disciplined mapping of its increasingly unknown territories. A beautifully sustained work of lyricism from a highly accomplished poet.

Limbo Road

Literature & Fiction

Poetry

Talonbooks

Since 1975, Ken Norris has produced some of Canada’s most intriguing poetry. Whether detailing the amorous lives of produce (Vegetables), documenting travels to the South Seas (The Better Part of Heaven and Islands), engaging contentious social and political issues (In the Spirit of the Times and In the House of No), or taking the measure of the successes and failures of contemporary love (The Music and Limbo Road), Norris has always given us quirky, edgy poetry that has continually revealed unanticipated possibilities and explored new horizons. His work has been widely anthologized in the English-speaking world, as well as in translation in France, Belgium and Israel. His latest book of poems, Limbo Road, is to be published this fall in translation in Quebec by Ecrits des Forges.Hotel Montreal offers the literary traveller a haven for clandestine encounters with the intimate and the exotic. It includes selections from nineteen ground-breaking books of poetry (a number of them now out of print or hard to find), as well as a healthy selection of accomplished new poems. It draws together the very best of Norris’s lyric poetry from a 25-year period, while offering the reader an indispensable panoramic view of the work of a poet at the height of his creative power.

Hotel Montreal: New and Selected Poems

If, as Robert Creeley said, form is never more than an extension of content,” what happens when we lose form? Does content retreat into its ruins, its absences? Can we never go home because it retreats from us as relentlessly and unfathomably as our future? Is the imagination of our” future as illusory and unreliable as the memory of our” past? If, for the young man, going home is the first defeat,” the first violation of a burgeoning autonomy, is the very imagination of home” an abrogation, a transgression? These are the questions that the deceptively simple lyrics of this book ask, that we encounter as we navigate our way, room to room” through their stanzasfrom the poet’s New York childhood, his Montreal mentorship with Louis Dudek, to his volitionary adoptive home” of Asia. The world changes in Going Home9/11 happens. In that singular, extended historic moment all of our working models of representation on our North American Island turn to paper and dust, and now we know history always had other plans for us. The whole manufactured unreality of our world falls away in these poems, leads us both toward and away from being at home” in the moment. We’re all here and not here,” the poet reminds us: an index of time and the true nature of existencea present impermanence.

Going Home

Asian Skies is the final book of Ken Norris’s travel trilogy. With Dante as his guide, he has previously left behind the predominantly European terrain of the first book, Limbo Road, only to find himself in the terra incognita of the new world of the second, Dominican Moon.Now guideless, Norris continues his search for the metaphorical shortcut, the inside passage” of the age of discovery; the easy transcendence of a passage to India” from the post-industrial world, and sets out for that most foreign of shores to the Western mind: Asiaa world of glittering wealth, precious spice, exotic religiosity, tyrannical rule, mysterious ritual and deadly storm.Composed like a dark novel-in-verse, this is the unsettling story of the deficiencies of love that have produced our commodified and globalized worlda perhaps not-so-divine comedy of those who don’t love enoughsteeped in a clash of cultures wherein the third world seems willingly, even perversely, to offer itself up as a simulacrum of the first, while its otherness remains hidden, inaccessible.As he transits the beaches of Phuket to the island of Bali, the flood plains of Bangladesh to the sublime heights of the Himalaya, Norris ultimately understands it is the absence of a beloved that turns the world upside down: where what was loved is hated, what was benign is threatening, what was dangerous is embraced, what was worshipped is murdered, what was past is future.Part travel journal, part meditation on the rudderless denizens of the global village of which he is merely one, Asian Skies chronicles a search for the beloved, one that will lead to the City of God.” That she appears only in glimpses is a credit to Ken Norris’s adept reading of the 21st century and his disciplined mapping of its increasingly unknown territories.

Asian Skies

Critically recognized as Canada's premier romantic poet, Ken Norris takes us with him in this book on his travels through the islands of the North and South Pacific.

Islands

Travel

Quarry Pr

<p>"He is in short, a poet, and a good one. The world he inhabits is a geographically, politically and emotionally extensive one in which he is entirely comfortable in his own skin, and therefore able to register the surrounding phenomena exactly." - Michael Fournier, Hiram Poetry Review</p>

The Way Life Should Be

Wolsak and Wynn Publishers Ltd.

This group of poets who gathered in the mid-70s around the alternative gallery Vehicule Art Inc. and the printing operation Vehicule Press was initially interested in gaining access to the means of production. But a funny thing happened on the way to print. The various poets coalesced into a group, feeding off each other's experiences and innovations. Inspired by the experimental environment of the gallery, the Vehicule Poets worked at the cutting edge of mixed media, poetry and video art. They took poetry out of the closet and put it on the buses, in the parks, on the dance floor and in the subway.The Vehicule Poets were an irreverent, adventurous lot, provoking both praise and vitriol from the public and the critics. Vehicule Days is an important record of literary and cultural history. The collection includes articles, essays and interviews, as well as a sampling from the works of the Vehicule Poets then and now.

Vehicule Days: Unorthodox History of Montreal's Vehicule Poets, An

Arts & Photography

History & Criticism

Signature Editions

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Books by Norris, Ken