"Short Shots" is a poetry book for poetry lovers and non-poetry lovers too. The poems in this book are very "short" poems. Easy reading with an emotional punch. With a wide diversity of subject matter there is something for everybody in the quaint yet compelling book.
About aging, Alzheimer's and the effects on the family. Dedicated to all those who travelled the winding road of life's journey and along the way, got lost; To all those who cannot find the missing pieces of the Puzzle; -To all those who say-'Please remember the real me, even though I cannot remember you.
The Phenomenalist is a work of metafiction in the avant-garde style of David Markson (Wittgenstein's Mistress), Jesse Ball (The Way Through Doors), Paul Auster (City of Glass), and others. And thematically, this book is much akin to Dostoyevsky's (The Double), Nabokov's (Despair), and Sarama[o's (The Double), with liberal doses of absurdism added for color. The central character, Karl, discovers through a series of encounters with body doubles, that true doubles share not only identical bodies, but also share a single consciousness as well. The story's unnamed narrator, who can read Karl's mind, but never reveals himself, secretly follows Karl and documents his movements and internal conflicts. Karl's discovery of doppelgangers leads him to question conventional notions of identity and continuity of self
These poems plumb the depths of human despair and softly illuminate the light at the end of hope's tunnel. We are all human, and Matthew Jose bares his heart and soul to show us his addictions, his muse, his monsters and his humanity in all its shining and stark nakedness. Dark and light dance in tandem throughout the text. These poems are a salve for the soul and a comfort for the lost and downtrodden. Jose is most definitely a rising star on poetry's ever waxing horizon.
S.R. Duncan has been in and around the poetry and communications scene in Vancouver for most of his life. He is a prolific poet writing about both the beautiful and the seedy side of life, work, acquaintances and family. Steven's poetry is evocative, cutting edge that cuts no corners. Of particular interest are the poems "Milltown Gunslinger"; "They Burn Dance Halls Don't They?"; "Party Like It's the End of the World" and of course many more.
Could a bug from a space shuttle really turn America into a third world country? It could, and, in this eco -thriller, journalist Graham Mole tells how. Nematodes that escaped from the crashed shuttle are killing trees and the world is facing a rude awakening back to the dark ages: No wood, no by - products like paper, no cellulose, no chemicals for medical drugs. This environmental concept is a chilling possibility as even now we witness our forests diminishing at a startling rate. What would the world be like without wood? How would life as we now know it change? Dick Walton is commissioned with finding a solution to the bug that came down in the space shuttle that crashed in Indonesia and is slowly killing the trees. To add to his problems he is crazy about two women and can 't decide which one he wants to be with for the long haul. Grace is the sultry, high class Washington DC secretary that is also super intelligent. And then there is Lestari, the exotic, and gorgeous daughter of the Indonesian Vice President. The push and pull of the ups and downs of Walton 's sex life and love life coupled with his intense scientific investigation of the rabid nematodes attacking the trees keeps him hopping from continent to continent and bed to bed.
Bill Engleson has written a very funny book filled with stories rooted in truth, and leavened with affection. The island, the people, and all that unfolds in between will keep you chuckling as you hang on for the ride. It makes me long to return to Denman." ~ Terry Fallis, two time winner of the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour, "The Best Laid Plans" 2008; "No Relation" 2015. The chapter titles tell us much. "Turnip Love." "Up and Down the Garbage Chute." In fact, the Table of Contents alone may put a smile on your face that will last the whole time you're reading this book -- except when you catch yourself laughing out loud. Bill Engleson is lively, entertaining, wise, and full of surprises. ~ Jack Hodgins, author and winner of the Lieutenant Governor's Award for Literary Excellence 2006; and Order of Canada inductee 2009. "This book is unremittingly mischievous. Its author ought to be exiled, like Napoleon, to some small island off the coast and made to subsist on a diet of boiled turnips and old western movies. Read it and see for yourself." Des Kennedy, author, islander, turnip grower... and award-winning journalist, broadcaster and environmental activist.
This is the story of Harold Dancy, a widower still hopelessly in love with his late wife, Nancy, and hopelessly alone without her. Desperate to be with her again, Harold goes to extreme lengths to be reunited with her once more, until the night he swears he sees her ghost intervene to save him from death. With a new lease on life and the help of his friend, former rock star Damon Alton, Harold attempts to move on, believing that Nancy would want him to do so. But does he really know how Nancy felt about him when she was alive? Why do strange things keep occurring when he tries to move on with a new woman, and does Damon know more about Nancy than he's letting on? What follows is the exploration of a broken marriage, told through the lens of a ghost story
This collection of poems is the fourth collection in the DOUBLE TROUBLE series-a new kind of experimental, off-kilter, off-key but oh so very in tune poetry. It will stretch your imagination past the point of breaking and then take it a couple of miles further. It's in your face, slap your mind alive, quick-take happenings of everyday abnormal life both on Earth and on Evidaris. This collaboration of 32 in depth grey matter structures pulled from the psyche and soul will titillate, charm and transport the reader to places unknown but somehow strangely familiar. On a clear night if you look really hard through your mind's third eye, you might be able to see Double Trouble rockin' and rollin' through the Milky Way in their brand new Bug Doyn Cart. They probably have a pocket full of miracles, oddities and old time slugs as they continue their search for the rare antique jukebox called "The Aclypalox". This is "the obsession" - the flash po-e-stories that are obsessing and possessing all the hip, juke-jock-joysters and yo-yo champions on Evidaris. It's arrived on Earth, and is coming to a bookstore / bookshelf / library / mind station near you soon. So buckle up Buckos and get ready for a wild and exciting mind trip into the land of illogical literature. All aboard for the Double Trouble Tripster Train to nowhere and ... everywhere!
Cynthia Sharp's collection begins with an invitation to accompany her on a journey of healing, even as we grapple with the very real threat of global ecological collapse. She explores with clear-eyed honesty the way we inherit from former generations both our strengths and the environmental degradation that threatens our very existence. Although there is real urgency in the present moment, Sharp's poems don't lead the reader into a mindset of panic and fear. Rather, she reflects on the lessons of the pandemic, how "we're all ordinary these days" and have been given an opportunity to slow down and witness the marvelous connections in creation and previously unimagined possibilities for healing ourselves and nature. In this simpler monk-like existence we can learn to breathe again, as do the lines of her poems. Sharp's attention to color, how she carefully notes hues and variations of shades and light, becomes a meditation in itself. Peach and pear are colors of morning in this "mysticism of color". Her poems often begin with a sense of domestic intimacy as in beginning the day by donning a "coral Italian silk blouse" with "pink petals" in her hair, a fitting garb for opening to "starlight/in royal blue skies", an expanding universe, and awareness of the sacredness of an individual life. There is a strong sense of feminine energy in these poems, and Sharp describes her relationship with her grandmother as a "communion of being". Right to the last poem there is the possibility of going through a "dreamtime" portal, acknowledging our own ephemeral condition with its aches and pains (both physical and existential) and being present to a higher frequency.
Music, Song and Dance. Each one has a passion, a tempo and a mood. Inherent unto itself, but there are some dances we dance with a lover that moves our spirit to ecstasy. When the dance is soul deep we enter the depth of the dance and know fulfillment of the highest kind. The poems in this collection are alive with glitter and glory, sorrow and defeat, and agony and ecstasy. The author weaves a web of mystery and magnificence reflecting in the movements of body, soul and spirit and the sounds of music. Life is the music. Our choices, the tempo of the dance we sway to and ultimately, we are the song we create. When we step into our composition, then we truly know 'the depth of the dance'.
This book is about failure. But not a personal failure. It is about failure in an existential sense. What does it mean for a people or a society to fail? And if a society does fail, how long does it take? Do its people know they are failing? Did the Romans know they were in decline? What actually constitutes a failure? In a wider sense, this might sound like end times or end of the world talk. And in some sense it is. But this notion of end times needs some clarification. There is more than one way to think about the end of the world. The end of the world can be thought of in linear terms, from a defined starting and end point. This is reminiscent of the Judeo-Christian world view, where God created the world and where he will one day destroy it. So maybe this is it, end times. Or one could take a more cyclical view, where the universe is seen in perpetual motion, going through cycles of creation and destruction, like in the Hindu vision. And perhaps we're at the cusp of one of its destructions. And to be fair, at many times in history, many people have lamented that we as a species were living in end times but the end never seems to come. Perhaps I am no different, perhaps people like me are the appointed criers of history which must signal end times every so often only to be laughed at later. However, the specter of nuclear warfare has added a new and deadly twist to the end time's argument (and as I write this, the war in Ukraine rages on which has brought back the terrifying prospect of nuclear destruction). But let's assume that perhaps I am wrong and we are not living through end times. If this is the case, then I argue that maybe we should be living through end times. Failure is heightened when the entity that fails has tremendous potential. We as a species have tremendous potential. We have done some great and splendid things, from our literary, mechanical, engineering, transportation, communication and medical advances to name a few. But we are falling short, we as a species could feed, clothe, house and educate every individual on this planet with some work. We could do so much more but we become so mired in bullshit, so mired in tribal disputes, we use our technologies and insights for base and harmful things; we are conned by demagogues and strongmen who claim they can save us. And we want to be saved so badly and in this pursuit to be saved we destroy ourselves. At no other time in history have we had this potential to make life better for our fellows, to truly live a meaningful life as individuals and a species. While meaning is subjective, we could try to create it together. And that is what makes me, and those like me, different than the ones in the past. In some sense, this book might be the voice of failure, of a lone being who somehow became cognizant of the failure of his society, of the lost potential. Perhaps we need the end, or at least an end to realize this. We squandered our potential and should wait for the next evolution to bring something better. Perhaps then, the end is not Armageddon, it is not some god smiting us. No, perhaps failure is the end, our own preventable failure. It is a slow, painful death that we as a species do not realize we are living through. And when we finally fail, when we are finally gone, then maybe a new evolution, an overman or some infinite being might replace us, try again, and succeed where we have failed. Pity we will not be able to see it. ~Angelo J. Letizia, Manchester MD, 1st, April 2022
In a text where men far outnumber the women, Serah's name appears in two lists, set centuries apart, without any other information about who she was or what role she might have played in events of the time. She must have led an extraordinary life. In the Medieval time period, multiple Sages recorded tales with Serah as the protagonist. The author has done her best to be faithful to as many of these stories as possible while weaving her own narrative, even in cases where contradictory understandings were presented.Around the time of the Enlightenment, in the 1800s, when rationalist thought was revered above supernatural and mystical explanations of the world, the stories of Serah sank into obscurity. While recent feminist scholarship has revived some interest in this fascinating woman, she is still unknown to the vast majority of people.The same might also be said of Osnat (whose name also appears as Asnath). 500 years ago, Osnat was a wise scholar at a time when few females received much education. She has been called the world's first female rabbi, though few today know of her and the stories of the miracles she is said to have performed.
Author's Foreword: Why short poems? Although compactness and density are important poetic virtues, I never set out to write poems of a certain length: a poem should be as long as it needs to be and not a syllable longer. But small things risk going unnoticed. Thus, although some of these poems have appeared in my previous twelve books, since most reviewers focus on the supposedly more 'serious' longer poems, they have received little attention. Moreover, because many Canadian poets still seem self-consciously caught up in creating the 'great Canadian poem', the national literary monument, those qualities of irony and wit, as distinct from broad humour and whimsy, that often characterize short poems tend not to be so highly prized. For the most part, Canadian poets - P.K. Page and Pat Lowther are two BC exceptions - are more likely to honour Whitman than Dickinson. Obviously short poems are best suited for epigrammatic insights into public life, the verbal equivalent of a good political cartoon, as also for thumbnail sketches of people, animals or cityscapes. Just as in painting, sometimes, an oil sketch or an apparently slight drawing will elicit an atmosphere, a charm and a sense of transience denied to the more solemn, fully finished masterpiece - think Rembrandt, Watteau, Goya, Daumier - so too, I hope, some of these snapshots will capture, in passing, aspects of everyday life that we otherwise might have forgotten to see.The way I have divided up the book is arbitrary, basically by subject matter rather than by theme, but unlike a regular book of poetry where one eventually reads the whole work, these poems invite random dipping. If some of them give the reader momentary pause, I shall be satisfied.~ Christopher Levenson
James Roethlein , a master of literary brevity, has a decidedly sensitive and intuitive side that merges an inquiring mind with an sentimental heart that spills with an eloquent ease onto the pages of this romantic book of poetry. "Writing with Scissors" is a cutting collection of words reflecting on the author's "silence of solitude" where home became more than a refuge, and a place to hide away from the world. These vivid and energetic poems, forged in a pandemic, burn a pathway through the woes of unrequited love, and random observances of the bittersweet, human condition. A brilliant compendium that represents both the roses and the thorns of our contemporary landscape. It's an easy read that will leave you coming back for more.
Prenumerera på vårt nyhetsbrev för att få fantastiska erbjudanden och inspiration för din nästa läsning.
Genom att registrera dig accepterar du vår personuppgiftspolicy.
