CosmoSonnets
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CosmoSonnets
Poems by Mari-Lou Rowley
Design and artwork by Robert McNealy
CosmoSonnets is a slip-stepping sortie into microcosmic and macrocosmic universes of neuron and tongue, schoolyard and kill site, suburb and cosmos. More like a jive. Less like a manoeuvre. With juxtapositions at warp speed, these sonnets and images defy the inevitable, toying with cosmology, myth and science in a manner that is not to be taken lightly. Watch out for sharp turns and charged voltas. Best read while in space flight of some sort or other.
Ghost Works
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Ghost Works
Poems & Correspondences by Alison Calder and Jeanette Lynes
Art, design & book production by Onjana Yawnghwe
In the fall of 2005, poets Alison Calder and Jeanette Lynes began a conversation about urban nature, how the city fits into the landscape, and how people fit into the city. Ghost Works records that conversation in a series of letters and poems, producing a linguistic landscape as textured and layered as the city itself. In its recurring motifs of shadow and trace, Ghost Works reminds readers that movement is always simultaneously progress and retreat,loss and plenitude.
Hand-stitched, printed on "Ash" Fabriano Ingres paper and vellum, and blockprinted images throughout. The cover is a silk-screen and block prints oncream Arches Cover paper.
the insistence of green/blue transport
Poems by Judith Krause
Art, design & book production by Shelley Sopher
When a visual artist and a poet decide to create a book together, who decides what constitutes a book? In conventional works, text trumps image. In art books, it’s the reverse. We, however, wanted to work in a more democratic way to make an art object that couples image and text so tightly that it would be hard to tell which existed first. To this end, the poetic form was chosen to complement the image on one side; on the other, the poem came first. The repetitions in the insistence of green, a villanelle, suggest the sounds of leaves in the wind. The long line of the horizon, separating earth from sky in blue transport, cuts the world in two, mimicked by the reversal technique that literally turns our world upside down. This latter poem, a kind of visual mirror, employs a form popularized by British poet, Julia Copus.
The photographs and text have been printed using pigment-based inks on acid-free paper. We chose the Oriental fold book structure because it afforded us both close-up and panoramic views.
The Raven and the Writing Desk
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The Raven and the Writing Desk
by Maureen Scott Harris; design and artwork by Kelley Aitken
The Raven and the Writing Desk: haiku variations, contains 14 haiku, accompanied by ink-wash drawings of ravens. An homage to and celebration of the raven, it reflects our shared conviction that ravens and other living creatures are always more than we humans think them—always shrugging away from our ideas of them—always astonishing us by exceeding or defying what we know of them. Since a good poem or artwork similarly resists containment and complete understanding, the chapbook witnesses as well to the unstable, unpredictable, and frequently joyous experiences of writing and art-making.
nonagon fugue
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nonagon fugue
by Sean Virgo; design and artwork by Jackie Forrie
nonagon fugue is a sequence of 36 short poems that form a fugue, in both the musical and psychological senses. Exotic, erotic, and tender, it tells a love story set in a world made in equal parts of memory, fantasy, and reality. The lovers' journey is mirrored in the artwork (montage and graphics) by Jackie Forrie, who also designed the book. A CD of the author, Sean Virgo, reading the fugue is included.
Smoking With My Mother
Text and illustrations by Dawna Rose
Design and production by Dawna Rose and Betsy Rosenwald
Smoking With My Mother uses drawn text, colourful pictures and a short animated film (included on DVD) to tell an intimate tale. In this new work Rose looks with humour and compassion at her mother's life.
Smoking With My Mother won Second Prize in the Limited Editions category of the 25th annual Alcuin Awards for Excellence in Book Design. Dawna Rose is a visual artist living in Saskatoon.
When Seeing Fails
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When Seeing Fails
by Paul Wilson; design by Tania Wolk
What happens to natural prairie when it is disappeared? What ghosts and memories offer themselves to one who tries to see, who listens from the “peak of Last Mountain”. In When Seeing Fails, Wilson charts a cartography of what can no longer be seen or completely understood. A triptych of longing, the sections in this book play off each other, walking the boundary between what is and what might have been.
All Our Wonder Unavenged
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All Our Wonder Unavenged
Poetry and illustrations by Don Domanski
Book design and production by Don Domanski, Barbara Klar, and Jennifer Still
All Our Wonder Unavenged is a meditative poem, exploring our kinship and connectivity with the world. The poem chronicles the events of a few hours spent in mindfulness.
Plush
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Plush
Poems by Holly Luhning
Design and production by Norma Jane
Plush revolves around the powder room. The poems investigate (often contradictory) concepts associated with the space of the bathroom, such as beauty, ritual, and illness. The book presents as an object one might find in a bathroom: the text is encased in a plush powder box, complete with a boa puff.
Cover: crushed velvet, rhinestones, synthetic pearls, ribbon.
Inside: boa sparkle powder puff.
Strung
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Strung
Poetry by Brecken Rose Hancock
Art and Design by Jessica Butler
The poems in Strung meditate on transience and seek transformative metaphors (metaphors that juxtapose decay and rebirth) to come to terms with death and its alteration of both the natural world and the interpersonal world. Focusing on family relationships, the collection dwells on landscape and its connection to the body; the construction and deconstruction of childhood memory; the numinous quality behind/within the mundane; and the way places and relationships reinvent and recreate themselves in cycles.
Cover: silk-screened cloth, nails, string.
Split ends
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Split ends
Story by Katherine Lawrence
Art and design by Betsy Rosenwald
Split ends is a short story that opens on Christmas morning in the living room of a small family. Humorous and painful in the way that only a family holiday can be, Split ends sends up the ritual of gift giving to reveal broken dreams and unspoken wishes.
Binding: glue, accordion folded.
Songs of Love and Honey
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Songs of Love and Honey
Text, artwork, and design by Kirsten Johnson
Silk-screened paper, stitched binding, hand-printed text.
Pliny’s Knickers
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Pliny’s Knickers
Poetry by Hilary Clark and Steven Ross Smith
Art and book design by Betsy Rosenwald
Pliny’s Knickers enacts language as arrival and manifestation, composed as it was in the “go-between”, the back and forth, of an email exchange between Hilary Clark and Steven Ross Smith. In this poetic ‘poly-logue’, the authors exercise their common interest in a poetics of constraint, of resistance, of inventiveness, and in the process of homolinguistic translation. In Pliny’s Knickers they stretch poetic norms – the pull toward convention, meaning, and syntactic regularity – into inventive, surprising, and sometimes humorous configurations.
THE UMBRELLA SUITES
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$30 SOLD OUT
THE UMBRELLA SUITES
Poetry and design by Mariianne Mays
thin-skinned
wet-weather pin, rust kit—
Drawing on the variance between loss, capture and confusion, UMBRELLA SUITES is a grouping of poems with the umbrella as its core device: Open and shut, fort and da, there and gone. The SUITES work from the blurred architecture of a figure in the rain to the sharpness of our weapons, from the intricacy of love to the subtleties – and absurdities – of (mis)communication and (mis)understanding.
Accordian-folded. Cover: foiled yellow Chinese joss paper with embossed stamp. Bound with silk string.
To Kerouac and Back
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To Kerouac and Back
Text, design, and adventure by Cory Wolfe and Darren Bernhardt
In the fall of 2002, two Saskatoon writers embarked on an 8,000-kilometre journey to Lowell, Mass., in pursuit of Beat Generation author Jack Kerouac’s ghost.
To Kerouac and Back chronicles the experience of driving 86 hours, consuming 71 coffees (large ones), meeting countless intriguing people, gawking at unpublished manuscripts, and teaching an American jazz musician to play the Hockey Night in Canada theme song. In the process, the authors stumbled across Little Canada in Minnesota and Moose Jaw in Wisconsin. The Moose Jaw Pub and Brewing Company is an homage – albeit somewhat misconstrued – to the Saskatchewan city. The proprietors built the restaurant as a hinterland log cabin. It is outfitted with newspapers, maps and photographs of its namesake city.
To Kerouac and Back is a narrative infused with journal entries, sketches and photographs. The authors’ adventure was triggered by their play, Alison’s Leather Couch, a one-act tribute to Kerouac, which is included as an epilogue. The play won first prize in the Saskatchewan Playwright Centre’s 2002 24-hour playwriting competition and was produced in the 2003 “On the River’s Edge” festival in North Battleford.
Kill-site: A Poem of the Invisible World
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Kill-site: A Poem of the Invisible World
Poem by Tim Lilburn
Book design and photography by Helen Marzolf
Kill-Site, the title poem of Lilburn’s Governor General award-winning collection, is a nine-page experimental poem that is a significant departure from Lilburn’s last collection of poems, To The River.
Cover: card stock, pencil.
The Breath of Looking
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The Breath
of Looking
Poetry by Sheri Benning
Book design by Rosalie Benning.
Paintings by Heather Benning and Mina Tobin.
The Breath of Looking considers the beautiful and bleak condition of our gaze; plumbing memory, the natural world, and relationship to a father, it points to how through loss we reckon with the world.
Cover: stamped leather.
Remnant
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Remnant
Poetry by Jennifer Still
Book design and photography by Troy
Mamer
Remnant is a poetic collection of remains, a sorting through of memory and object to reconcile the inheritances, the remnant threads of old buttons, and the losses, the unwritten recipes, between generations of women.
Cover: unbleached, stitched cotton, button, embroidery thread.
Gabrielle and the Man
who is Belly-flopped on
the World
Order: $30
Gabrielle
and the Man who is Belly-flopped on the World
by Ellen Quigley and Rebecca Langer
Illustrations by Rebecca Langer
Gabrielle was a silly kid, known for drawing on walls, whispering songs in people’s ears, and acting out dreams during the day—but what awaited her in her night time slumber far out-sillied anything she had ever imagined. She met the man who is belly-flopped on the world, and that was only the beginning…
Cover: lino print, brown paper, cotton.
Seeds
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Seeds
Text, book design, and lino prints by Erin Bidlake
Seeds, taken from a full-length manuscript entitled Harvest Moon Addiction, is an exploration of nourishment, both physical and spiritual. In its attempt to make sense of the relationship between sower and seed, it visits a family whose longing can be felt in their cultivation of land and love.
Cover: silk-screened burlap.
Contemplation and Resistance:
A Conversation
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Contemplation and Resistance: A Conversation
by Tim Lilburn andJan Zwicky
Photography and book design by Helen Marzolf
An epistolary of poetic and philosophical thought by two of Canada’s most accomplished poets, Tim Lilburn and Jan Zwicky.
Cover: card stock, reed.
Mayfly
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Mayfly
Poetry by Anne Simpson
Art and Design by Heather Benning
The mayfly is unique in that it is buried as larvae in sand for three years before surfacing to live only a few hours. These ten philosophic poems by award-winning poet Anne Simpson query the notion of change as it relates to Eurydice, Orpheus and even the death of Socrates.
A Long Day Inside the Buildings
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A
Long Day Inside the Buildings
Sean Johnston
Art and Design by Drew Kennickell
A Long Day Inside the Buildings is the story of an elementary school teacher struggling to be true to his students and teach them about a world that increasingly baffles and belittles him.
Cover: full-colour 8 1/2 x 11" card stock, stapled binding. Inside: black and white text and illustrations.
The Love Project
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The
Love Project
Art and design by Tamara Bond
The Love Project is a series of fourteen narrative drawings, each with their own individual story. Placed in each are things I love; pigdogs, pink socks, cupcakes, trap doors, puppets and Roald Dahl’s stories are some examples from a list of 140 items I wrote out at the beginning of this series.
I began this list in my journal as an exercise to define things that I love and to produce something positive in the midst of our sometimes uncertain and chaotic world. By randomly choosing ten from a jar to compose each drawing I was interested to discover how these items would fit together. The combinations of things created narratives that were unexpected and at times seemed not random at all.
Cover: cotton fabric on paper, three-flap folder with tie. Inside: full-colour reproductions of The Love Project.
The Departure Of the Name
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The Departure Of the Name
by Miranda Traub
Art and design by Darren Molnar
The first part of The Departure Of the Name is a fragment from a longer series of poems that meditates creatively upon known yet inexhaustible mysteries such as the Incarnation and the Nativity, and allows the spirit of music to penetrate both form and content. The second part is a selection of uncollected poems.
Cover: Indian leaf paper, South American blood wood, hemp cord and stamp.
Five Ways To Lose Your Way
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Five Ways To Lose Your Way
by Don McKay
Art and Design by Dorothy Field
Five Ways To Lose Your Way is a verbal and visual foray into varieties of lostness in the post–industrial forest. The design is based on CAA trip–tiks, those personalized travel guides that take you from here to there (maps included).
Cover: vellum, vegetable parchment, orange “falling boundary” tape, cerlox binding.
Tower Road
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Tower Road
Poems, art, and design by Barbara Klar
Tower Road consists of four poems about fear, fire, loss, lostness, and walking in the lodgepole pines of the Cypress Hills. Written, designed, and with images by Barbara Klar, each copy features original “stone prints”, black–and–white photographs, and other visual surprises. Tower Road is a compass guiding the reader in the four directions, a mountain flower unfolding from its centre of flame. A stunning artifact created with both a poet’s and a cartographer’s sensibilities.
Cover: card stock, acrylic paint.