Rooted in Zen, Taoism and traditional Chinese
poetry, influenced by modern Western movements such as Surrealism and
Expressionism, this poetry collection reflects the author's
transfigurations and redemptions of life's drabness with imagination, harmonizing oriental wisdom with metaphysical sensibilities.
POETRY
ISBN: 9781894770231
Price: $16.95
Another Way to Dance
Contemporary Asian Poetry from
Canada and the United States
This anthology contains some of the most active and
dynamic voices of contemporary poetry written by Americans and Canadians
of Asian background. The poetry has a wide-ranging appeal reflecting
place and time. Bold clear imagery and motifs depict a changing North
American landscape of cultural and spiritual heterogeneity. Included are
Canadians Joy Kogawa,
Rienzi Crusz, Suniti Namjoshi, and Himani Bannerji,
and Americans Arthur Sze, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, David Mura, Cathy Song.
The poems in this collection, in various sections, elaborate on the
emotional experience of challenging and trying; explore the ways of
accepting vulnerability, and drawing understanding from it; search for
beauty in endurance; explore protest and resistance; and finally revolve
around the idea of taking risk and learning and becoming through
experiences larger than the self and beyond the personal.
“…a restlessness of spirit and mind .
. . that shines through without succumbing to the usual romantic
clichés.”
In this new collection of
poetry, Kuwabong shows a maturity of voice and a larger poetic
vision to celebrate love—love for the people of the Caribbean
and love between lovers.
In the first part of this
collection the love that is
celebrated emerges from a deep sense of historical reconnection
with the poet’s African ancestors who were taken captive and
sent to the Caribbean. But the focus is not on the brutality of
their enslavement, though that is the guiding principle that
informs the poetic voice. The poems perform a retrospective
search for the roots that his African ancestors planted in the
new world without romanticizing their struggles, defeats, and
victories. Thus they recreate the continental African as a
seeker of a poetic understanding of the African Diaspora in the
Caribbean.
In the second part, Kuwabong takes the reader through a Prufrockian maze
of relationships complicated by expectations and
disappointments. The city of Hamilton, Ontario especially
provides the social and physical landscapes that initiate the
personae’s responses to love made tricky by the extreme
challenges of the mundane. Though the poems silently scream with
pain and disappointment, these moods are calmed by epiphanies of
extreme tenderness that bind the relationships.
This long-awaited first collection of poetry by queer Sri Lankan writer
and spoken-word artist Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is full of the
stories we’ve been waiting for. Tracing bloodlines from Sri Lanka’s
civil wars to Brooklyn and Toronto streets, these fierce poems are full
of heart and guts, telling raw truths about brown girl border crossings
before and after 9/11, surviving abuse, mixed-race journeys and high
femme rebellions. Consensual Genocide celebrates our survival and marks
our rebel memories into history.
“Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha's words leap off the
page–urgent, sumptuous writing that demands, and deserves, a wide
audience. I'm listening.”
— Anna Camilleri, author of I Am a Red Dress,
editor Red Light and Brazen Femmes
The poetry and prose of
Rienzi Crusz are about many
things—exile, identity, family,
religion, politics, and racism—and this work is an attempt to
demonstrate that the various facets are a result of a holistic vision
that transcends narrow labels. Crusz is best known in Canada as a
diasporic writer, committed to exploring the complexities of living
between and among two worlds. This study goes beyond binary formulations
to argue that while such markers are necessary, a full understanding of
the poet's achievement requires that personal history, the political
context of migration, poetic influences, and readership in Canada be
taken into account. A carefully researched and definitive study, Dark
Antonyms and Paradise offers an insightful reading of the work of a
major Sri Lankan Canadian poet.
Written
at locations as widely disparate as eastern India, northern Canada,
western Bolivia, southern Ireland, and even the taxiway at Boston's
Logan airport, these poems explore the broad reach of the English erotic
idiom. These are poems about love—sometimes licit though often not—lust,
and the language of desire. Not primarily concerned with displacement or
diasporic experience, they nevertheless reveal a deracinate and
dark-limbed Krishna sort of fellow—reminiscent of classical Sanskrit
erotic poetry—flitting in and out of these pages.
In his tenth collection of poetry, Rienzi Crusz
attempts to track and document his faltering human journey towards God
and the Divine. Reflecting a devotional tradition professionally
Catholic as well as South Asian (bhakti), these poems are witness to a
personal love of God and the frailty of the human loves. Gambolling
with the Divine is the Augustinian confessions retold with
brilliantly vivid Sri Lankan and Canadian variations.
“...powerful, controlled and
disciplined.”
—Dawn
(Pakistan)
Hemisphere of Love reflects the author’s
passion and honesty as he delves into the mystery of love and strives to
bring order to human experience. In this collection a range of scenes
and situations is carefully carved in words and couched in metaphor.
Geographical and spiritual boundaries, shifting tonalities and moods
carry the reader into Dabydeen’s complex universe. Janus-faced, he
continually looks forward and backward.
“...skilled, crafted, layered,
full of contrasts” —Books in Canada
“A gifted Canadian poet.” —Toronto
Star
“Dabydeen's poetry has
Stravinsky rhythms.” —The Ottawa Citizen
From the very first piece
in this collection, the title poem “In a Boston Night,”
Sasenarine Persaud signals a return to the passionate and
sensuous that informed much of his earlier work. Persaud, the
poet as craftsman, is ever present in this collection, using a
complex series of personas and “voices” moving back and forth in
time and place. Boston, the focal point of this collection, is
like a needle hole through which the poet deftly threads his
reflections about places, events, and histories: a conflict
between Anglo- and Franco-Canadians at a Brookline art
exhibition; Georgetown and Mumbai; Tampa and Toronto; the
“Boston Tea Party” as a symbol of resistance to American
English, subtly underlined by the description of a Walcott
reading in an overflowing university hall. This is a fine,
multilayered collection of poems by an important and
accomplished contemporary poet.
edited by
Mary Schulman, Joan Braman,
and
David Weintraub
This collection brings together in
English the work of one of the most gifted and remarkable Jewish poets of the
Soviet Union, Peretz Markish. Suffused with a consciousness of suffering, homelessness, and
inevitably, the Holocaust, these modernist poems are meditative, elegiac, and
prophetic in tone, and touch on the themes of loss, loneliness, displacement,
war, and the yearning for renewal. Inextricably bound up with Markish’s Eastern
European Jewish identity, they are also intensely personal, modern, and
universal.
This book includes both the English translation and the original Yiddish text.
This long narrative poem in English with Chinese follows
one woman's journey from China to Canada over four decades. In these
pages the two languages sit side by side, mirroring each other, each
telling a tale that alternates between confusion and despair and hopes
and dreams. Lien Chao depicts the struggle of a generation in its
persistent search for freedom and for free artistic expression.
"A fascinating and unique creation."
—David Helwig
The poems in The Matuschka Case represent the core
of Fraser Sutherland’s poetic preoccupations over several decades. They
are enquiries into the nature of happiness, absent or present, deserved
or undeserved. For Sutherland, happiness consists in the practice of
art, and in often baffled attempts to understand the other. Rueful and
sardonic, uncomfortable in his own white skin, he seeks the other in
everything that is foreign and unfamiliar.
“Those who think they
know Sutherland's taste as a reviewer
may wish to look more closely at these
poems, which have something of the best
of the jazzy, itinerant Beat in the
earlier work and a surprisingly deft, if
understated, cultural commentary in the
latest.”
These
poems, created both in English and Chinese, explore the experiences of
Chinese and other Asian Canadians.
Using various poetic forms, lyric and narrative,
Lien Chao presents us with experiences and reflections and confronts
issues of identity, assimilation, and language. These issues occur in
the very act of confronting the two very different languages—Chinese and
English—with each other, so that that confrontation itself becomes a
metaphor for adaptation and conflict of cultures in Canada.
Passionate and subtly exotic, keenly aware of Persian
mystical love concepts, and with a trained eye on Hindu mythology, these
supple new poems explore the territories of love, the longings of the
body, and the pains of loss and exile.
“... lyrics that are almost too posh,
almost too sumptuous...hauntingly lovely.”
—Halifax Chronicle Herald
POETRY
ISBN: 9780920661901
Price: $13.95
No More Watno Dur
Sadhu Binning
"Sadhu Binning's poetry gently provokes
and evokes. He uses the tools of language, both Punjabi and English, to
guide the reader through a private journey of public relevance. Rooted
in a history of cultural and labour activism, this collection questions
our notions of home, family and community. No More Watno Dur (Watno
Dur means 'far away from the mother land') firmly establishes Binning as
an essential poet who must be read in order to understand this
continually unfolding experience of home and homeland in the Western
world..."
The poems in this book form a narrative whole that leaps
between past and present, between childhood and adulthood, and between
languages. Issues of cross-cultural politics and relationships are
addressed, and loss across generations and migrations across continents.
All of this is entwined with the search for the poet-father and
the attempt to come to terms with the past.
"These poems travel continents, move
through emotional and political geographies of leaving and longing. From
India to England to Canada, Rajinderpal S Pal searches for his poet
father's legacy in language and body. Textured and sensuous, challenging
in form and content, these poems invite us to hold them."
—Roberta Rees
This
collection is a sensory journey from a warm green equatorial island to
the changing seasons of a Prairie landscape. These poems explore the
effects of colonialism, ancestral memories, and immigration on
the poet's journey from youth to maturity. The frantic push for
first-world development, rapidly eroding the once-pristine landscape and
simple way of life of a third-world island, and creating a new race of
colonials, is passionately delineated. The book is
sectioned as follows: Roots, Indian Sojourn, Prairie Seasons, and
Autumnal Season.
This
first volume of poetry bridges the spaces between cultures. From
detailed observation and personal experience, with honesty and clarity,
these poems reflect upon the poet’s Asian and Western experiences.
Ancient legends counterpoint modern observation; beauty and peace are
offset by the raw reality of death and dying.
Erudite and referential in both cultures, these poems are also
intelligent and accessible.
In this volume, Barnett Zumoff has stepped into the
breach by creating and presenting masterly translations of 85 Yiddish
poems by the best of the women poets and 60 Yiddish poems about women by
a broad range of the great male poets. Women play a major role in
Yiddish poetry, both as brilliant creators and as beloved subjects of
male poets: mothers, wives, daughters, lovers, and historical and
legendary figures.
Readers previously unfamiliar with Yiddish
literature will obtain a striking picture of a
magnificent slice of world literature and will experience the emotional
impact of great poetry. Those familiar with Yiddish literature will
experience a revelation when they are exposed to the poetic creations of
its women poets, whose work is far less well known that that of the male
poets, but is equally brilliant.
“Songs to a Moonstruck Lady is a treasure. In Barnett Zumoff’s
careful choices and supple translations voices long forgotten come
startlingly alive once again, surprising and touching us. An
invaluable collection.” — Jeremy Dauber, Columbia University
“Dr. Zumoff’s translation of love poetry in Yiddish has opened the
door to humanism in Yiddish– especially because the poems are
beautifully chosen and well translated.” — Dr. (Rabbi)
Hertzberg, New York University
BILINGUAL POETRY
ISBN: 9781894770262
Price: $22.95 (Paperback)
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this
book:(Paperback):
ISBN: 9781894770279
Price: $30.95 (Hardcover)
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Wanting in Arabic is a refusal of convenient silences,
convenient stories. The author dwells on the contradictions of a
transsexual poetics, in its attendant disfigurations of lyric, ghazal,
l’ecriture feminine, and, in particular, her own sexed voice. Without a
memory of her father’s language, the questions her poems ask are those
for a home known through photographs, for a language lost with
childhood.
“Trish Salah's poetic sequence is not
simply a narrative of gender change; it's a wandering, thoughtful text,
one both fierce and tremulous.”
—Erin Mouré
“...Salah’s writing bosoms up every damn dam in the literary waterway.”
