Mini Book Expo For Bloggers

Anatomy of Keys [Memory's review]

Anatomy of Keys unlocks its story with clever articulation for Memory:

While the events of Houdini's life form the backbone of the piece, Price also invites us to consider the nature of bondage and escape on a metaphorical level.  He contrasts Houdini's talents as an escape artist with certain personal experiences from which the man was never fully able to extricate himself.  The reader, too, finds herself entrapped by the story.  The narrative is complex; it twists and turns, and follows no set chronology.  Price jumps from one event to the next with little regard for where they fit in the timeline.  The result is a complicated, thought-provoking piece that challenges the reader with every word.
* 3 stars *

Keep reading Memory's review...

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More information

• Brick Books | Chapters.ca  | Amazon.com
• ISBN-10: 1894078519 
• ISBN-13: 978-1894078511

The Anatomy of Keys [Steven Price]

Poems

Courtesy of Brick Books

 

A tour de force, a book-length poem, embracing a wide variety of poetic and prose forms, to tell the story of Harry Houdini.

Steven Price's Houdini knows better than most the limitations of life, having bent the efforts of a lifetime to transcending them, and having failed. Ah, but his thinking! Or rather Steven Price's thinking with and through him. "Make it muscular and be apparent in it," says Houdini's archivist/advisor, "words are also escapes." So they are in a book with the sinew of Anatomy of Keys. The facts of Houdini's life are here - immigration to America, youth, circus stint, fame, that notorious life-ending punch - but the facts are the spine of a deep and ardent meditation on what is. In poems of astonishing technical virtuosity, Steven Price reads Houdini's world and our own in compellingly original ways.

Swivel-and-snick sputter of a turned handle.
Bald knob bare in the palm. The torpid click
And calm take of springs triggered far within.
I'd set myself to hear it clear again,
That ordinary hinge and creak and drag
Of doors we live with all our days and lose 

The wonder of.

From "XLIV.iv" 

 

About the Author
Steven Price was born and raised in Colwood, BC. His work has appeared in Canadian and American literary journals. He is one of the poets in Breathing Fire 2: Canada's New Poets, edited by Lorna Crozier and Patrick Lane. Price graduated from the University of Virginia Writing Program, and currently teaches poetry and writing at the University of Victoria.

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More information

• Author Site: [Link to author's site or blog] 
• Book Site: [link to dedicated site or blog about the book] 
• Extra Info: [ToC, excerpt, sample image] 
• Brick Books | Chapters.ca  | Amazon.com

Product Details

• 2 copies available This book is CLAIMED
• Paperback: 144 pages 
• Publisher: Brick Books (May 29, 2006) 
• ISBN-10: 1894078519 
• ISBN-13: 978-1894078511

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Night Work [John's review]

Well, they sure don't make Leafs like they used to.

Here John tells us how Night Work waxes poetic about one of the greats:

Told in a series of mostly narrative poems, this is the biography of Terry Sawchuk, one of the NHL's greatest goalies of all time. I'm sure followers of hockey, especially in its "good ol' days," would recognize more of the players, nicknames, and actual games and most likely enjoy this book. But I'm proof that being a hockey fanatic is not a prerequisite. Had Sawchuk been an entirely fictional character, Maggs' poetry would stand on its own. That Sawchuk actually existed simply adds to the mystique.

Keep reading John's review...

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More information 

• Brick Books | Chapters.ca  | Amazon.com
• ISBN-10: 1894078624 
• ISBN-13: 978-1894078627

Jaguar Rain [Jan E. Conn]

The Margaret Mee Poems

Courtesy of Brick Books

[This description has been updated!]

Jaguar Rain is a rare text:at once a book of stand-alone poems and a work of scholarship, with textual notes and bibliography. Written in the voice of Margaret Mee (naturalist, explorer, and painter of flowers in the Amazon between 1956 and 1988), the poems are infused with wonder at a discovered new world of extraordinary richness, which is also an old world still governed by myth, and the ecological interdependence of everything: plant, animal, human, god; the living and the dead. Sources for this collection include Mee's journals, sketchbooks, and paintings. Jan Conn is a scientist by education and occupation, but biologist meets poet in the deep dive into the soul of the rainforest. She creates the Amazonian world from inside, from her own ardent research travels there, as well as through the sharp eyes of Margaret Mee.

Will the boat come back for me? Nights
on this rocky island a possum steals my fish

 

and the phosphorescent eyes of a coral shark slide
back and forth across the sandy shallows, sleepless,

ravenous. Days I watch wasps
construct paper nests like miniature pots,

the hinged lids ingenious. ...  from "Aripuana"

About the Author
Jan Conn is a Research Scientist at the Wadsworth Center, New York State Department of Health, in Albany, NY, and Associate Professor in the Biomedical Sciences Department at the School of Public Heath at SUNY-Albany. Her current research is focused on the populations of malarial mosquitoes in the Brazilian Amazon. She has published five previous books of poetry, most recently Beauties on Mad River: Selected and New Poems (2000). "Amazonia," a suite of poems, won second prize in the CBC Literary Awards, 2003.

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More information

• Author Site: Jan Conn 
• Brick Books | Chapters.ca  | Amazon.com

Product Details

• 2 copies available This book is CLAIMED.
• Paperback: 112 pages 
• Publisher: Brick Books (March 20, 2006) 
• ISBN-10: 1894078489 
• ISBN-13: 978-1894078481

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Two Hemispheres [Nadine McInnis]

Courtesy of Brick Books

Imagining the lives of nineteenth-century women asylum patients, Nadine McInnis charts her descent into, and recovery from, depression. 

In the afterword to Two Hemispheres, McInnis describes her first encounter with the remarkable photographs that illustrate this moving volume. Patients of the Surrey County Lunatic Asylum, these women’s names and stories are lost to history. McInnis imagines their experiences of mental illness as she explores her own journey through clinical depression, and finds in these haunting photographs solace and community.

I used to embellish an impressive picture 

of the woman whose palms 

I mysteriously possess, describing her 

right down to her mismatched shoes: 

her gait, stiff and shuffling, from nights spent 

sleeping under the bridge near the off-ramp, 

her hair, a tanled nest of leaves and dead grass. 

-- from "Entertainment: a dramatic spectacle"

About the Author

McInnis is the author of six other books, including Quicksilver (short stories), Hand to Hand (poetry), and Poetics of Desire: Essays on Dorothy Livesay. Her work has appeared in a variety of journals, including The Malahat Review, The New Quarterly, Event, and Room of One’s Own. She lives in Ottawa where she teaches in the Professional Writing Program at Algonquin College.

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More information

• Brick Books | Chapters.ca  | Amazon.com

Product Details

• 2 copies available This book is CLAIMED
• Paperback: 95 pages 
• Publisher: Brick Books (July 3, 2007) 
• ISBN-10: 1894078594 
• ISBN-13: 978-1894078597

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Night Work [Randall Maggs]

The Sawchuk Poems

Courtesy of Brick Books

A hockey saga, wrapping the game’s story in the "intense, moody, contradictory" character of Terry Sawchuk, one of its greatest goalies.

Denied the leap and dash up the ice,
what goalies know is side to side, an inwardness of monk
and cell. They scrape. They sweep. Their eyes are elsewhere
as they contemplate their narrow place. Like saints, they pray for nothing,
which brings grace. Off-days, what they want is space. They sit apart
in bars. They know the length of streets in twenty cities.
But it’s their saving sense of irony that further
isolates them as it saves.
– from "One of You" 

In compact, conversational poems that build into a narrative long poem, Night Work: The Sawchuk Poems follows the tragic trajectory of the life and work of Terry Sawchuk, dark driven genius of a goalie who survived twenty tough seasons in an era of inadequate upper-body equipment and no player representation. But no summary touches the searching intensity of Maggs’s poems. They range from meditations on ancient/modern heroism to dramatic capsules of actual games, in which the mystery of character meets the mystery of transcendent physical performance. Night Work is illustrated with photographs mirroring the text, depicting key moments in the career of Terry Sawchuk, his exploits and his agony. 

About the Author 

Randall Maggs is the author of Timely Departures (poetry, 1994), and co-editor of two anthologies pairing Newfoundland and Canadian poems with those of Ireland. He is artistic director of Newfoundland’s March Hare festival of music and literature, and teaches literature at Sir Wilfred Grenfell College, Memorial University. 

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More information 

• Brick Books | Chapters.ca  | Amazon.com

Product Details 

• 2 copies available   This book is CLAIMED
• Paperback: 189 pages 
• Publisher: Brick Books (February 15, 2008) 
• ISBN-10: 1894078624 
• ISBN-13: 978-1894078627

Shipping within Canada & the US sponsored by Brick Books