The Irrationalist

Literature & Fiction

Buffam, Suzanne

Poetry

Canarium Books

Poetry. The ambition of Ish Klein's debut collection, UNION!, like that of the Soviet/Russian "Soyuz" space program it's named after, is to take us to another world so that we may better see our own. Klein traverses ocean, earth, and sky with spiritual longing as she compassionately describes human loneliness, and each poem is a love letter written to a civilization left behind. Here is a voice like "A spark from Hard Silence made mad," replete with yearning and fierce with mystery, and even as the poems teeter on the invisible line between wit and sorrow, each poem attests to Klein's promise: "I sympathize with all the creatures in this story."

UNION!

Klein, Ish

Poetry. Subtly incorporating myth, history, landscape, pop culture, and aesthetics as possible solaces within the labyrinth of grief, THE TANGLED LINE explores the fragile circumstances of family and fatherhood. These poems remind us that when we try to possess, literally or figuratively, materially or metaphorically, legally or lyrically, we create the possibility of violence to ourselves, others, and the world—often injuring that which we hold most dear. "Father-son. Bodies. Seeing. Conventions of sentences. Grace. Distrust. Guilt. Souped-up engines. Sorrow. Love. Process. Hunger. Elk hair. Celebrities. Topeka. Arkansas. Tennessee. Spokane. A myth. The new you. A chicken-necked Daedalus. A pale cavefish. Red berries. If you're looking for a poet who can 'describe Breton to the Enlightenment,' look no further"—Gillian Conoley.

The Tangled Line

Marshall, Tod

“All my poet friends mourned when Paul told us he’d be going into law, so soon after he appeared on the scene as a supernova. ‘No fear. The blue light. My breath washing out in the air.’ Yes. He came out strengthened. Grown in imagination. Bigger in his lucid scanning of America. Rejuvenating. To read him is a delight.” - Tomaz Salamun “I thought: ‘this is an anecdotal phenomenology’ and looked up the derivation of anecdote: ‘thing given out.’ These poems keep giving and giving out; anecdotes evaporate and recrudesce in a different form, in new detail. Meaning emerges as each observation defamiliarizes the next and the prior. An epistemology punctured with an affectionate loathing opens out into love. Agonized, startled, startling wit. Truthtelling that fails because it’s truthful. These poems leave me alert to the floating world. Welcome Paul Killebrew, tabula rascal.” - Catherine Wagner “[Killebrew] plunges us into a world we inhabit but seldom notice, forcing its horror on us but also reminding us why we go on coping with it, why we’re in it for the long haul, wherever the carpool takes us.” - John Ashbery

Flowers

Killebrew, Paul

“Buffam’s often deadpan tone is like a magical dustpan that sweeps up the strangest observations and ideas, all worlds to themselves. Her ‘Little Commentaries’—‘On Piñatas,’ ‘On Fountains,’ and ‘On Vanishing Acts’ (to name only a few)—are absolute gems, kin to Anne Carson’s town poems and Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit. Buffam’s poems tug at new corners of the brain. They’re marvelous.” - Matthea Harvey “Buffam begins with a world that ends, a world that is always ending. This is not despair, but a shrewd mind behind an honest eye that in wry observation creates out of small poems a book of knowledge, ‘Little Commentaries,’ which show there is no wisdom unsharpened by wounding wit. That motion is an essential motion, and these are essential poems.” - Dan Beachy-Quick “These poems try to achieve something almost impossible: not to betray the ironic today while celebrating the interiority of a serious meditation. And they succeed in doing it. What a treat!” - Adam Zagajewski

“Only a genius could write a book called The Waste Land and Other Poems. Well, John Beer is that person. I set out to write a treatise on failure, and it turned out my subject was love, he writes. Call it my confusion. We should all be so confused.” - John Ashbery “The Waste Land and Other Poems may or may not be the most important book of American poetry in the last eighty-eight years, but when the next eighty-eight years are up, I give it a good shot to be the most important first book in American poetry since Some Trees. I've been right a number of times before, even if no one seems to be listening. Sometimes lightning strikes a church tower and the whole town catches fire.” - Kent Johnson “Am trying in a handful of sentences to write a blurb for John Beer's The Wasteland and Other Poems - something that will describe the newness of the work and something that will praise the invention of it. Have been halfway tempted to simply steal a snippet from someone else's jacket and tailor it to suit J.B. If only it were that easy! Anything I find on the rack is too small. John Beer is a poet of big shoulders. You should have a feel for yourself.” - D. A. Powell “John Beer’s long overdue first book is a perfect mirror of a world that has borrowed more than it can ever repay. He embraces and distills 'the bad dream' and all 'the muck' of the recent past, but the momentum of this book is full speed ahead. Unflinching, unrepentant, soulful, brilliantly imagined and with eyes wide open, he is the poet of onwardness for the next century. If ever a book lives up to its title, this one does.” - Lewis Warsh

The Waste Land and Other Poems

Beer, John

Poetry. WE ARE PHARAOH is the debut collection from Robert Fernandez, native of Miami, recipient of a PIP Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative Poetry, and resident of Iowa City. Like a fever or a fire, this book sweeps across our contemporary cultural landscape, setting aglow and surveying its elements, then cataloging the embers. "WE ARE PHARAOH is a luscious saturnalia of language, adapting New York School painterliness to an erotic tropical sensibility: 'A mandrill clutching the throat in the billiard hall of Pele.' Its magic raises the pulse."—Ange Mlinko

We Are Pharaoh

Fernandez, Robert

Poetry. MOVING DAY is the second collection by acclaimed poet Ish Klein. In this book, the poet deepens her commitment to socially-engaged lyricism, as she directly confronts the darkest sources of conflict and shared suffering while also investigating and celebrating the relationships that help us deal with personal, societal, and environmental ills. Like Whitman and O'Hara before her, Klein is a poet of camaraderie and boundless love. "Kids need each other. / Better they never get / separated entirely."

Moving Day

Poetry. Bilingual Edition. Translated from the Russian by Christopher Mattison. A FIREPROOF BOX is the first English-language translation collection of poems important young Russian poet, novelist, and translator Gleb Shulpyakov, who was awarded the prestigious Triumph Prize for his poetry in 2001. As Evgeny Rein states in his introduction to the collection, Shulpyakov's poetry is that of one "who understands the value of existence, of the spiritual richness of existence which can descend upon any person."

A Fireproof Box

Shulpyakov, Gleb

Poetry. All wide awake in a state of delirium, Darcie Dennigan's MADAME X stands at the intersection of the surreal and the historical, an ill communication of the anxieties and ecstasies of the 21st century.

Madame X

Dennigan, Darcie

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Books by Canarium Books

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the Canarium Books publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Irrationalist

UNION!

The Tangled Line

Flowers

The Irrationalist

The Waste Land and Other Poems

We Are Pharaoh

Moving Day

A Fireproof Box

Madame X