With growing ecological, economic, and political instability, one wonders how long things can continue as they are. Don't we seem overdue for some fundamental restructuring of our systems? Our society? Ourselves? What other worlds are possible? &#8203;In his project, the Icon, Brendan Graham Dempsey is imagining a future civilization through its canon of sacred scriptures. This multi-media work--incorporating writing (in various genres), illustration and music--will offer a glimpse into an imagined culture, an entire tradition of myths, rituals, songs and ceremonies, philosophy, criticism and commentary. And just as every civilization has its epic literature, so GOD, a 500-page pentameter poem written by a mysterious figure named Julian, is theirs. DEATH is the first installment in the GOD trilogy. It takes as its subject the last myth with any real currency in secular times: The Death of God. What the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche had ominously alluded to, Julian's first poem chronicles in dramatic detail, enlarging the haunting philosophical myth to 125 pages of industrial war in Heaven. We hear it all from Joel, a former angel who sided with the insurrectionists after Heaven failed him. Singing on his mandolin by the grave of God, Joel offers his account of God's death in memory of Sacredness: a final song to eulogize Spirit. From the ancient origins of religion, then, to the modern disenchantment of the world, Joel narrates the West's epochal transformation, overseen and led by an iconoclastic intellectual named John Faust. The fallout from this existential war, and the personal quest it sets in motion for the speaker, will be taken up in the poem's sequels, DESCENT (summer 2019) and RESURRECTION (summer 2020). GOD is presented in the form of a critical edition by this culture's future scholars. In addition to Julian's poem, then, are over 150 pages of supplementary material. This includes <ul> <li>two prefaces and marginal notes by the poem's original editor, A. Severan</li> <li>introduction, additional marginalia, and appendices of extended notes, discussion questions, and literary criticism by the critical edition's editor, M. M. Greenwood</li> <li>the Corpus Julianicus, a (probably pseudepigraphal) collection of texts purported to be those of the author, from which his traditional biography has been abstracted</li> <li>a musical liturgy from the imagined culture's catechism-esque work, the Praxipoetica</li> <li>a collection of discovered manuscript fragments that develop material from Julian's work; and, finally,</li> <li>the first in a triptych of philosophical essays called The Oil & The Lamp.</li> </ul>

GOD - I. DEATH (NCV)

Dempsey, Brendan Graham

Religion & Spirituality

Palimpsest Press

Projections

Sarah Lockwood

The term still life did not come into being until 1650. The French adopted the term nature morte, dead nature, around 1750. The painter de Chirico was said to have preferred the Italian term vita silente. The Japanese, however, call still life, calm things. Calm Things is the title essay of this collection of meditations on what it is like to live with still life, and to live poetically. Both an insiders glimpse into the precarious world of artist and poet, and a long gaze at objects and the calm and silence they hold, these essays prize the ordinary, radiant gift of common things.

Calm Things: essays

Lemay, Shawna

Biographies & Memoirs

A collection of engaging essays on writing and material culture that addresses our ability to know or understand 'things'. In A Peepshow with Views of the Interior, acclaimed fiction writer and poet Aislinn Hunter writes lyrical paratexts on topics ranging from Charlotte Bronte's dogs, bird displays in museums, peep shows, and clocks and convalescence.

A Peepshow with Views of the Interior: paratexts

Literature & Fiction

Hunter, Aislinn

Essays & Correspondence

Pain-Proof Men

Barger, John Wall

Poetry

Hump is a mash-up of pregnancy-and-mothering poems and urban/nature/love poems that functions as an anti-sentiment manifesto from Winnipeg writer Ariel Gordon. Month by month, stanza by stanza, Gordon attempts to adequately represent the wonder and devilment of being-with-child. Hump is a love poem written simultaneously to a father and child, to a lover and the glimmer in his eye, and to a city that is gritty, faded, but still greener-than-most.

Hump

Ariel Gordon

History & Criticism

Lilianna and Thom never thought they would meet a Sepherii, the mythical creature from stories of the Dark Days when Morauth spread evil like a contagious disease across the land. For years the children have sat through Master Blisk's boring lectures, dusted off and retold, of Faltofar's bleak past. So what does it mean when the siblings encounter Torr deep in the ancient forest adjacent to their home? Why has the Sepherii been summoned again? Decades have elapsed since the Last Battle on the icy Ledges in the High Country. In hand to hand combat, Rendar overwhelmed Morauth, cutting her deeply with the black obsidian blade, given to him by Torr. The victorious Army of the One had disbanded, heading back to their homes, convinced Morauth had been banished forever, her body buried deep in the Great Rift Valley. But, was she?This time, Lilianna and Thom will be called on to help. Only the Dagger of Rendar, handed down through their family for generations, has the power to banish her again. But in the hands of a child will the weapon be enough? The young descendants of Rendar must be strong enough to strike the blow. Nothing less than the future of Faltofar and all its inhabitants is at stake. It just gets a little muddled when the family tree also includes the sorceress Morauth.

Faltofar

Teen & Young Adult

Stewart, Morri

In Elisabeth Harvor's poetry collection An Open Door in the Landscape, the real and the surreal exist side by side. Doors open on snow, war, influenza, summer and winter oceans, the efficiency of obsession, and men who can dance. In yet another world, on a hot city morning in our most recent century, the tiny industrial screech of insects in August gardens becomes a backdrop for a lovesick woman waiting on a veranda for the postman to bring her relief "in the last era before e-mail, in the last era before high tech gives short shrift to longing." Other poems shine out of more fleeting events, each poem radiating with the emotional intensity of its moment.

An Open Door in the Ladscape

Harvor, Elisabeth

Gunmetal Blue is an investigation of how to be in the worldhow to be a doctor, how to be a poet, and how to be both. Tempered with memoir and populated with poetic case studies, Neilson learns about himself as his patients reveal their frailties. Medicine might be considered the more productive activity by society, but Neilson found poetry in every office visit. Taught to research clinical questions, he took this scientific practice and made it a literary one: how can a doctor better know his patients, and how does this translate into self-knowledge? Poetry and medicine are topics intertwined since the time of the Greeks and, in this case, the connection between the two literally becomes his lifeline.

Gunmetal Blue:: Essays on Poetry & Medicine

Neilson, Shane

Arts & Literature

Jan is a 17 year-old kid in trouble with the law. Al is a feisty old coot. Paired together because Jan must serve community service hours at a seniors residence after pleading guilty to a marijuana possession offense, the two initially resent each other. Gradually, the curmudgeonly Al becomes mentor and father-figure to the young delinquent. Through the old mans guidance and the boy's re-framing of a series of bad dreams, Jan begins to imagine other possibilities. He learns to value compassion and decency as part of successful human relationships. Making a choice to leave behind his unsavory past, Jan falls in love with young Jodi, with books, with ideas and writing because of Al's influence. When the old man is diagnosed with terminal cancer, Jan resolves to be bodyguard to Al. With this choice, one life ends and another begins.

Not With a Bang

Sobat, Gail Sidonie

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