Happy 10th! David Worsley on Once and Thought You Were Dead

The Biblioasis titles that first worked for me were by Rebecca Rosenblum and Terry Griggs. Once and Thought You Were Dead had a younger urban focus and a lighter touch that I think are still a bit underrepresented in Canadian fiction. There's not a hell of a lot of mystery to getting introductory readers interested in a book. They need to see even a bit of themselves in it, and find something to identify with. It doesn't hurt when talent wins out in the process. With that in mind, Random House has apparently let Terry's book, Rogues Wedding, go out of print. It would look great in a Biblioasis reprint series.

- David Worsley, Words Worth Books 

Happy 10th! Marilyn Gear Pilling on Robyn Sarah's Little Eurekas

Robyn Sarah’s Little Eurekas is a book that has meant a good deal to me. I open it regularly and for a variety of reasons. From it, I may gain inspiration or add to my knowledge of specific poets or read about one or another of a wide variety of topics that pertain to poetry. Or I may want to enter a world where poetry is taken seriously and filtered through the sensibility of a writer and critic whose work I greatly admire. At times I open the book just to be in her company for an hour or two. This is a work that enlightens, entertains, surprises, and communicates the beauty, depth and necessity of poetry.

- Marilyn Gear Pilling

Happy 10th! Robyn Sarah on The Lily Pond

Sometime in 2007, fellow Biblioasis writer Mike Barnes sent me, in manuscript, an essay he’d just written called “Two Rooms”, asking for my response.  From the first paragraph, I found it electrifying, astonishing, and (remarkably) strangely beautiful despite its harrowing subject matter. It described his hospitalization, in his early twenties, following a bizarre self-mutilation, and what came after: misdiagnosis, two years of failed drug trials, electroshock treatments, a staff meeting that nearly saw him transferred to a long term care facility; then months of near-coma resulting from a prescription dosage error.  “Two Rooms” was the genesis of The Lily Pond: A  Memoir of Madness, Memory, Myth and Metamorphosis (Biblioasis, 2008), a series of four interlocking personal essays that probe the impact of mental illness on a life over a period of thirty years.

The Lily Pond is a one-of-a-kind book.  It is so much more than a book about mental illness; it could hardly be further from a self-help book or a popular-style “recovery memoir”. There is not a buzz-word to be found in it, not a single stereotype or oversimplification, not a second’s pandering to the voyeuristic impulse of a public hungry for sensational true stories. No sermonizing, no self-congratulation.  Instead, with humbling honesty, and bringing a formidable intelligence to bear on the subject, Barnes gives us a rare inside look at mental illness and its treatments, interweaving autobiography with reflections on paintings, literary works, myth, metaphor, and scientific lore.  His interest is in the psyche’s resources for healing and in the universals of the human condition as filtered through the particulars of his life experience. His book is, perhaps more than anything, a work of philosophy and a testament to human resilience and creativity.

One of the things I love in The Lily Pond is the voice in which the essays unfold: measured and sober, meditative, freeassociative, often mesmerizing, yet enlivened by unexpected turns of the imagination (think Oliver Sacks, think W. G. Sebald.)   It’s a book that digs deep and wakens wonder – a deep-sea dive of a book, able to pull me in again and again to surface each time with an enriched appreciation of the things that matter in life. 

Happy 10th! Amanda Jernigan on Track & Trace

Dear Biblioasis,

I've been dipping back into Zach Wells' book Track & Trace, which I bought and browsed when it first came out -- but it's only now, on further reading, that I appreciate the neat fit of Seth's austere cartoons (if I can call them that) with the rigorously pent emotions in Zach's poems. As John Metcalf once wrote to me, talking about Ben Jonson's "On My First Daughter," "It may be that it is the distance itself which is so moving."

That's a brief appreciation, as I can hear the baby stirring and the toddler (who's been at the park with his saintly grandmother) approaching home, but I hope it will serve your turn. I, too, lament the speed with which backlist books fall off the publicity radar. For years I've dated the flyleaves of books according to when I bought the books -- but it's often years before I really get round to reading them. Better, I think, to record the date (with a really good book, dates) of reading: the date(s) when the words actually entered/re-entered your thought and life.

Happy 10th! Tom Dilworth on Light Lifting

Light Lifting, for which Biblioasis acted as midwife as well as publisher is a great book, important for me for lifting the west end of Windsor into literature of a high, international calibre and, in doing so, establishing its publisher as an important one. 

Happy 10th! Patrick Warner on Malarky

I look to small presses for the unexpected, for books that remind me that there is always a fresh way to approach literature. What reader isn't looking for work that knocks the stuffing out of the hoary old maxim about there being nothing new under the sun? Of course there is. A few years ago I picked up a Biblioasis title, Malarky, by Anakana Schofield. I hadn't heard of the author and didn't know anything about the book. I wasn't even done the first page when all of the lights came on and stayed on for the next two hundred odd pages. What's more brilliant than brilliant? I don't know, but Malarky is a good example of it.

Congrats on your tenth! 

Happy 10th! Shane Neilson on CNQ

The magazine CNQ changed my life. I remember picking up a copy of the version edited by John Metcalf and printed by Tim Inkster, elegant and woodsy, in 1999. I must have bought it at a dreaded Chapters big box store, perhaps in Clayton Park when I was going to medical school. I remember reading Carmine Starnino deglove a couple of Canadian poets, perhaps Anne Szumigalski and David Donnell; John Metcalf corrected a reputation too. Was it M.G. Vassanji? I can't recall, but what I do remember is the payload of the prose: megatons of devastation wrought on a literature that was, vastly, too nice. CNQ was the only place to go for, if not the truth, then for passionate disagreement with received wisdom. The spirit of that issue, and the issues thereafter that have come under the editorial eye of Alex Good, inform my writing still. 

Happy 10th! Catherine Chandler on Time's Covenant

Eric Ormsby's Time's Covenant, published by Biblioasis in 2007, is a fine example of exquisite, meticulously crafted, musical and meditative poetry. Quite simply put, the volume is a treasure-trove, containing Ormsby's five published books of poetry as well as many of his (at the time) unpublished and uncollected poems for the period 1958 to 2006.

Ormsby is a master of metaphor and imagery. His evocations of people, places, things and ideas are breathtaking in their beauty, luxuriance, precision and scope, witnesses to his love of the “doubleness of things”—as he writes in his poem “Spider Silk”—and to a linguistic brilliance hinted at in his poem “Quark Fog.” And while examples of his gorgeous lines and stanzas are too numerous to list here, by way of illustration I would include one of my favorite Ormsby poems, “Amber”, a meditation on love and mortality where—as in many of his poems—universal truths are to be found in everyday objects and isolated moments of time. The poem, quoted in its entirety below, is dedicated to his wife, Irena.

Amber

                For Irena

Prismed by amber, the insect's wing
Curves outward in a resinous nonchalance.
Casual fatality has paused in its dance.
I am tenderest when I touch this glozened thing.

Time's imagination stumbles me,
The way time tastes the roof beam's future ruin
Or calibrates the hovering, faint tune

In the siskin's wingbeat, with its brief veracity.

The stillness of surviving objects pleases
Our reveries. The inarticulate
Obduracy of a tigrine chip of agate
Spilled from a misplaced cuff link seizes

Our attention, so mere things appear
Stationary, resistant, and impervious.
The opera glasses, pearl-lensed, that will outlive us
Accord a terrible pleasure of mortality. We're

Cruelly honoured in our transience,
Evanescent instances of some unique
Reticulation. I hear you speak
Close to my ear. I feel your diffidence

As you slip your clothes and then your jewelry
And press against me till our nakedness
Warms us with momentous gentleness
And we lie hidden in that clarity.

Happy 10th! David Mason on Lucky Bruce by Bruce Jay Friedman

John Metcalf mentioned one day in passing when we were discussing Mario Puzo that I would find mention of him in a book Biblioasis had published, a memoir by Bruce Jay Friedman called Lucky Bruce. 

He was a friend of Puzo’s. 

“It is also pretty funny,” John said.

I couldn’t understand why Biblioasis would be publishing a book by a minor Jewish-American writer whose books I had seen for years but never been tempted to read. I ordered it on John’s recommendation and found it such a great read that I ordered ten copies which I’ve been giving to friends ever since. 

It’s a fascinating book and as John said, “Very funny.” I have also acquired the rest of Friedman’s books which I am reading my way through.

I still don’t understand why Biblioasis published it but I’m glad you did. Highly recommended. Now that I think of it I don’t know why you published my book either but I am glad you did that one too.

Dan, maybe you’re crazy or maybe Biblioasis is going to be a great publisher.

Happy 10th! Annabel Lyon on Dragonflies by Grant Buday

Grant Buday's Dragonflies (2008). A prose retelling of The Iliad from Odysseus' point of view. The great strength of Buday's novel isn't in any formal innovation or revisionism. Rather, it's the crispness and humour and beauty of the prose that make this book worth seeking out.

Happy 10th! Mark Kingwell on Jailbreaks by Zach Wells

Jailbreaks: 99 Canadian Sonnets is one of the best anthologies of poetry I know, and in my top five contemporary poetry books ever. Zach Wells selects sonnets from across the country, across generations, and across styles. For those who think sonnets all look the same, there is much to learn here about the range of poetic possibility within a single set of formal constraints. Among other clever things, Wells's introduction argues that the fourteen lines of the Petrarchan and Shakespearean sonnet forms are poetry's finest vehicle for introducing, developing, and concluding a well-formed thought. These poems are thus phenomenological jailbreaks, consciousness busting out -- in good order -- from the buzzing prison-yard of our jumbled minds. A book to dip into or read cover to cover, with delight on every page.