Translated from The Danish by Gregory Pardlo With an Introduction by Stephen Cain Produced in conjunction with the author's appearance at Harbourfront's 2004 International Festival of Authors in Toronto as part of their SuperDanish Festival, Pencil of Rays and Spike Mace is the first full-length collection in English by Niels Lyngsø, one of the most original poets working in Denmark today. Translated by New York poet, scholar, and translator Gregory Pardlo, who worked closely with the author to capture not only the multiple nuances of each poem but to also transpose their deliberate physical and visual properties, Pencil of Rays and Spiked Mace contains work from three of Lyngsø's collections: Stof [Matter], Force Majeure [Force Majeure], and MORFEUS [MORPHEUS]. Like their Danish originals, these poems "make reading happen" and are a fascinating introduction to the visionary and conceptual landscape of a truly unique poet whose work, as Stephen Cain suggests in his introduction, shares similar qualities to the poetry of some of Canada's more daring practitioners, such as bill bissett, bpNichol, and Christian Bøk.

Pencil of Rays and Spiked Mace: Selected Poems

Literature & Fiction

LyngsØ, Niels

Poetry

Book*hug Press

If Language

Betts, Gregory

Danish poet Morten Søndergaard has been living abroad and spent some time in the little Italian town of Vinci. The poetry in this collection is the result of that experience. It dramatizes various aspects of (post)modern reality, dreams, family life, architecture, sculpture gathered together as a landscape through which the reader can wander, thoughtful, bemused, amused, but always as language's companion. Søndergaard's creativity is as forcefully life-embracing as his poetry is convincing and captivating. He is also typical of the younger Danish generation's approach to literature: anything goes, but seriously. Vinci, Later was shortlisted for the Nordic Council's Prize in 2003. Morten Søndergaard carefully brushes the lint off our shoulders, then crouches behind the controls of his poems and does everything to dislodge us from our feet. As doomful and slapstick as Beckett, he gives voice to the ground we stomp all over, and the stuff aside from people that peoples our world. What I'm saying is: This is an astonishing collection. -Stuart Ross

Vinci, Later

Søndergaard, Morten

Poetry. Lisa Robertson's latest book of poetry is a work that will be both familiar and fresh to anyone who has read her acclaimed work. THE MEN explores a territory between the poet and a lyric lineage among men. Following a tradition that includes Petrarch's Sonnets, Dante's work on the vernacular, Montaigne, and even Kant, Robertson is compelled towards the construction of the textual subjectivity these authors convey-a subjectivity that honors all the ambivalence, doubt and tenderness of the human. Yet she remains angered by the structure of gender these works advance, and it is this troubled texture of identity that she examines in THE MEN. At once intimate and oblique, humorous and heartbreaking, composed and furious, THE MEN seeks to defamiliarize both who, and what, men are. "In THE MEN, as in much of her work, Robertson makes intellect seductive; only her poetry could turn swooning into a critical gesture"--Village Voice. "Robertson writes both from within and against the tradition-splitting, seeding, and suturing the cracks in each ideational edifice.... Her occupations with past forms lead not to a backward-looking poetry but forward to a fresh field of inquiry, an imaginatively created utopia"--Boston Review.

The Men: A Lyric Book

Robertson, Lisa

Poetry. Translation. The English translations of his poems in WE ARE HERE are no different than the original: they address what Hav considers to be elemental about life, that undeniable essence without which everything makes little sense. His voice is direct and humorous, intelligent, lyrical and philosophical: a voice that takes into account the difficulties of staying close to the elemental. Hav is devoid of sly obfuscation; he is a poet unafraid of being clear. What could bemore direct or elemental than the fact that WE ARE HERE?

We Are Here

Hav, Niels

The Basho Variations gathers thirty-four translations of Basho s famous haiku. In doing so it enters an august (albeit scanty) lineage of maverick redactions of this poem that include (as inaugural) the frog pond plop by Dom Sylvester Huédard and the fog prondl pop by bp Nichol. Inspired by Raymond Queneau s Exercises in Style, it also joins the company of his earlier Restricted Translation with Imperfect Level Shift (After Basho) as well as the Frogments from the Frag Pool: Haiku after Basho by fellow ludicians de langage Gary Barwin and Derek Beaulieu; Beaulieu s solo ((plop)) and Basho s Frogger (a Zen video game) created by the Prize Budget for Boys.

The Basho Variations

McCaffery, Steve

Fiction. From interdisciplinary writer and performer Jacob Wren comes POLYAMOROUS LOVE SONG, a novel of intertwined narratives concerning the relationship between artists and the world. Shot through with unexpected moments of sex and violence, readers will become acquainted with a world that is at once the same and opposite from the one in which they live. With a diverse palette of vivid characters—from people who wear furry mascot costumes at all times, to a group of 'new filmmakers' that devises increasingly unexpected sexual scenarios with complete strangers, to a secret society that concocts a virus that only infects those on the political right—Wren's avant-garde POLYAMOROUS LOVE SONG (finalist for the 2013 Fence Modern Prize in prose) will appeal to readers with an interest in the visual arts, theatre, and performance of all types.

Polyamorous Love Song (Department of Narrative Studies, 12)

Wren, Jacob

Contemporary

Fiction. Latino/Latina Studies. Guadalupe Muro, recipient of the Raul Urtusan-Frances Harley scholarship for young emerging Artists from Argentina, has always had her own unique way of experiencing life. When applied to her writing, Muro says she finally "felt like a dog deciding to be a dog." Muro's Spanish publications have achieved strong acclaim, and now, BookThug is proud to introduce this remarkable new talent to the Canadian literary market. AIR CARNATION features an absorbing narrative that bridges non-fiction and fiction, poetry and song, as Muro explores themes of independence in love and the writerly life. With sojourns in Argentina, Buenos Aires, New York, Washington, and a cross-Canada train passage from Edmonton to Toronto, AIR CARNATION is an affecting work that will have readers laughing, crying, and all the while, enjoying this fascinating meta-fiction that sings of hippiedom in Patagonia.

Air Carnation (Department of Narrative Studies, 13)

Muro, Guadalupe

United States

Poetics. Memoir. SECESSION/INSECESSION is an homage to the acts of reading, writing and translating poetry. In it, Chus Pato's Galician biopoetics of poet and nation, SECESSION—translated by Erín Moure—joins Moure's Canadian translational biopoetics, INSECESSION. To Pato, the poem is an insurrection against normalized language; to Moure, translation itself disrupts and reforms poetics and the possibility of the poem. In solidarity with Pato, Moure echoes Barthes: "A readerly text is something I cannot re-produce (today I cannot write like Atwood); a writerly text is one I can read only if I utterly transform my reading regime. I now recognize a third text alongside the readerly and the writerly: let's call it the untranslatable." In SECESSION/INSECESSION, a major European poet and a known Canadian poet, born on opposite sides of the Atlantic in the mid twentieth century and with vastly different experiences of political life, forge a 21st century relationship of thinking and creation. The result is a major work of memoir, poetics, trans-ethics and history. Chus Pato's Secession was chosen as a 2009 Book of the Year by the Revista das Letras, literary supplement of Galicia Hoxe (Galicia Today).

Secession/Insecession (Literature in Translation Series)

Mouré, Erin

Pato, Chus

Essays & Correspondence

While bpNichol (1944-1988) has attained iconic status in Canadian literature in recent years, particularly through his lifelong poem The Martyrology and his work in visual and sound poetry, there are numerous early "fugitive" sequences that are often referred to in critical studies, but are long out of print and only available in library special collections or in the hands of rare book collectors. bp: beginnings brings together these pre-Martyrology materials in one comprehensive collection, including such key texts as Nichol's first chapbooks Beach Head and Cycles Etc., the minimal lyric sequences The Other Side of the Room and The Journeying and the Returns, and various concrete and sound-texts such as Lament, The Year of the Frog and Ballads of the Restless Are. These collected sequences show Nichol developing his talents in both visual poetry and lyricism, pointing the way towards the union of the two forms in the later Martyrology. Combined with The Captain Poetry Poems (published by BookThug in 2011), bp: beginnings now makes all of Nichol's major poetry sequences available to both the avid Nichol specialists and to aficionados of innovative poetry everywhere.

bp: beginnings (Department of Reissue)

Nichol, BP

History & Criticism

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