Thursday Poetry Round-Up

Since the weather has started to cool down in the past couple days, and the leaves are beginning to turn colour and loosen from their branches, and there's an undercurrent of wood smoke in the breeze, I'd be lying if I said it didn't all put me in a contemplative mood. So, with the spirit of contemplation in mind, I thought it would be the perfect opportunity to bring a few recent poetry notices to your attention. 

A couple weeks ago, Catherine Owen's The Marrow Review did a nice roundup of two of our poetry books chosen completely at random: Meeting the Tormentors in Safeway by Alexandra Oliver and Meniscus by Shane Neilson. Oliver's 2013 Pat Lowther Award-Winning Canadian debut gets a favourable nod for its "sing-songy, Philip Larkinesque, rhyming, mannered, smart, continental and often quite droll" lyrics while Shane Neilson's "sophisticate and slant" musicality  in Meniscus is praised for its "bleeps & grinds & mellifluous witnessings to loss." Owen is especially fond of Meniscus for its controlled yet intense exploration of "elegy, insanity, injury and adoration."

Susan Gillis has been doing some great work on her newish blog Concrete & River of late, and this past week saw the posting of a short but fascinating exchange between her and Amanda Jernigan. Jernigan describes the various ways in which localized speech, a magical house of books in Virginia, and the life-altering experience of motherhood have informed her work and vision over the years. You can read the full exchange here. Jernigan's Groundwork was a 2011 Best Poetry Book, and her 2013 Cormorant follow-up, All the Daylight Hours, was a National Post Canadian Poetry Book of the Year for 2013.



Catherine Chandler's sonnet "Coming to Terms" received a Laureate's Choice Award earlier this month in the Great River Shakespeare Festival, Maria W. Faust Sonnet Contest (Winona, Minnesota). It was singled-out among over 400 submissions by poets from thirty-six U.S. states and seven countries. The poem, which also won the 2010 Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award, appears in Chandler's Glad and Sorry Seasons. See why Eric Ormsby says there is "no form of which Catherine Chandler is not a master, from quatrains and Sapphics to ballads and pantoums. She is an especially brilliant sonneteer." 

And finally, Kerry-Lee Powell's Inheritance, which is our lead fall poetry title and which is making its way through the printers at Coach House as we speak, is a 49th Shelf Most Anticipated Fall Poetry Book. Kerry-Lee's fiction has won her a two book deal with Harper Collins as well as accolades from the likes of Nathan Englander and Junot Diaz, and her poetic debut is a fierce and moving one. It should definitely be on the radar of all lovers of Canadian Poetry.

And now back to my coffee and weltschmerz.

Alexandra Oliver Wins Pat Lowther Award

Alexandra Oliver Reads from
Meeting the Tormentors in Safeway
at the League of Canadian Poets'
Award Ceremony

We're delighted to inform you that on Saturday evening the League of Canadian Poets announced Alexandra Oliver's Meeting the Tormentors in Safeway won the Pat Lowther Memorial Award. The Lowther is given annually to a book of poetry by a Canadian woman, and carries a $1,000 prize. It is presented each year at the League’s Annual General Meeting in May or June. Previous winners include Karen Solie and Dionne Brand.

For those of you new to Alexandra's work, you're in for a treat. Meeting the Tormentors in Safeway was a Canadian Poetry Book of the Year (National Post, 2013) and from first page to last stands as a testament to the sheer performative power of form. It's acerbic, witty, dramatic, moving, and sharp. Below is a sample of what the critics had to say. And if you've never had the pleasure of hearing Alexandra read, we highly recommend you check out some of her recent performances online: this is from our fall 2013 Toronto launch, and this is Alexandra's reading at the TIFF Bell Lightbox in 2011.

We hope you'll join us in offering your hearty congratulations to Alexandra, and to all the other nominees (Elizabeth Bachinsky, Anne Compton, Sadiqa de Meijer, Micheline Maylor, and Sarah Yi-Mei Tsiang). The recognition is much-deserved. 

Praise for Alexandra Oliver

“An incredible feat of vision and voice … technically, nothing is out of Oliver’s grasp. Her go-to iambic pentameter can swallow anything in its path. Meeting the Tormentors in Safeway should go a long way toward establishing Oliver as one of the country’s best stanza makers, with a fluidity and ambition aspiring to Dylan Thomas or Yeats  … When she succeeds, she succeeds entirely.”—Michael Lista, The National Post

"Alexandra Oliver has many arrows in her quiver—all of them sharpened to a fine point … This is an excellent and entertaining collection."—Timothy Steele

"It is sometimes argued that our disjunctive times need to be mirrored by disjunctive forms: only aesthetic disorder can respond to our experience. Such a simplicity is disproven by Alexandra Oliver’s Meeting the Tormentors in Safeway, in which disjunctions of many kinds (such as the one in her title) are brought to order by the poet’s refining passion and corrosive wit. Here are brilliantly contemporary poems in traditional forms, the work of a stunning new voice."—Charles Martin

"Alexandra Oliver is in full command of a saber wit and impeccable ear. With these she tackles nothing less than the unsettling hazards, absurd encounters, and oddball ironies of our modern predicament to make poems that bite and entertain … Oliver’s considerable formal skills are always employed to prod and direct poetry’s energies to keep pace with the contemporary world. Lucky the reader along for the ride."—Jeanne Marie Beaumont

'I pretend I’m like a film camera': Alexandra Oliver on Community and Poetic Practice

"I’m a big believer in the musty old adage, “Wherever you go, there you are.” When I begin conjuring the material for a poem, I pretend I’m like a film camera, taking things in from different angles and perspectives. I’m a noticer; I like to turn things over and examine even the most superficially boring aspects of everyday life. Then, sometimes, something mystical and often outlandish enters the room and you get a poem, a real poem that works on different levels. That’s the best outcome of all, and an elusive one at that. But none of this happens without community. By community, I’m not referring to only the literary community, but also those that exist in other spheres: people on the street, in shops, in doctors’ offices, on the bus, at the school gates. You need to take everyone in as part of your circle."

Glasgow-based poet and Pat Lowther finalist Alexandra Oliver discusses community, poetic practice, and the twined perks/problems of being an outsider with The Town Crier's Jess Taylor.

Biblioasis Author Interviews and Reviews

I'm happy to bring you more great news for Bibliosis authors.

Alexandra Oliver appears on rob maclennan's blog for an interview regarding the Pat Lowther-shortlisted collection Meeting the Tormentors in Safeway.

The Underground Book Club posted a glowing review of Zachariah Wells' Career Limiting Moves: Interviews, Rejoinders, Essays, Reviews. Michael Bryson calls it "Playful, snarky, sharp-witted, intelligent and polemical ... his debate skills (formidable) leave his opponents flattened."

EVENT Magazine reviewed Jessica Hiemstra's Self-Portrait Without a Bicycle, describing it as follows: “The poems themselves-free-verse stanzas whose titles are almost always composed of subject and verb, and whose sentences often overlap with the first lines of subsequent sections—dart in and out [of] narratives … [and] are strongest when the narrative stakes are highest … tender and convincing.”

Alexandra Oliver Shortlisted for Pat Lowther Award

Dear Friends: We're delighted to kick off National Poetry Month with happy news: this morning the League of Canadian Poets announced that Alexandra Oliver's Meeting the Tormentors in Safeway was shortlisted for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award. The Lowther is given annually to a book of poetry by a Canadian woman, and carries a $1,000 prize. It is presented each year at the League’s Annual General Meeting in May or June. Previous winners include Karen Solie and Dionne Brand. For those of you new to Alexandra's work, you're in for a treat. Meeting the Tormentors in Safeway was a Canadian Poetry Book of the Year (National Post, 2013) and from first page to last stands as a testament to the sheer performative power of form. It's acerbic, witty, dramatic, moving, and sharp. Below is a sample of what the critics had to say. And if you've never had the pleasure of hearing Alexandra read, we highly recommend you check out some of her recent performances online: this is from our fall 2013 Toronto launch, and this is Alexandra's reading at the TIFF Bell Lightbox in 2011. We hope you'll join us in offering your hearty congratulations to Alexandra, and to all the other nominees (Elizabeth Bachinsky, Anne Compton, Sadiqa de Meijer, Micheline Maylor, and Sarah Yi-Mei Tsiang). The recognition is much-deserved. For ordering information, more about Tormentors, or a sample poem or two, please read on. Peace and love, Biblioasis. Praise for Alexandra Oliver “An incredible feat of vision and voice … technically, nothing is out of Oliver’s grasp. Her go-to iambic pentameter can swallow anything in its path. Meeting the Tormentors in Safeway should go a long way toward establishing Oliver as one of the country’s best stanza makers, with a fluidity and ambition aspiring to Dylan Thomas or Yeats  … When she succeeds, she succeeds entirely.”—Michael Lista, The National Post "Alexandra Oliver has many arrows in her quiver—all of them sharpened to a fine point … This is an excellent and entertaining collection."—Timothy Steele "It is sometimes argued that our disjunctive times need to be mirrored by disjunctive forms: only aesthetic disorder can respond to our experience. Such a simplicity is disproven by Alexandra Oliver’s Meeting the Tormentors in Safeway, in which disjunctions of many kinds (such as the one in her title) are brought to order by the poet’s refining passion and corrosive wit. Here are brilliantly contemporary poems in traditional forms, the work of a stunning new voice."—Charles Martin "Alexandra Oliver is in full command of a saber wit and impeccable ear. With these she tackles nothing less than the unsettling hazards, absurd encounters, and oddball ironies of our modern predicament to make poems that bite and entertain … Oliver’s considerable formal skills are always employed to prod and direct poetry’s energies to keep pace with the contemporary world. Lucky the reader along for the ride."—Jeanne Marie Beaumont

About Meeting the Tormentors in Safeway

Trade Paper Sept. 2013 978-1-927428-43-6 14.95 USD/17.95 CAD 64 pp In Meeting the Tormentors in Safeway, Alexandra Oliver zooms in on the inertias, anxieties, comedies, cruelties, and epiphanies of domestic life: They all had names like Jennifer or Lynne or Katherine; they all had bone-blonde hair, that wet, flat cut with bangs. They pulled your chair from underneath you, shoved their small fists in your face. Too soon, you knew it would begin, those minkish teeth like shrapnel in the air, the Bacchic taunts, the Herculean dare, their soccer cleats against your porcine shin, that laugh, which sounded like a hundred birds escaping from a gunshot through the reeds— and now you have to face it all again: the joyful freckled faces lost for words in supermarkets, as those red hands squeeze your own. It’s been so long! They say. Amen. Oliver’s poems, which she describes as “text-based home movies,” unveil a cinematic vision of suburbia at once comical and poignant: framed to renew our curiosity in the mundane and pressing rhyme and metre to their utmost, Meeting the Tormentors in Safeway is a five-star performance from Canada’s new formalist sensation. Visit Alexandra's website Visit Biblioasis's website Purchase a copy online

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Precision-Crafted Machines Spring Anticipation

Over at The Afterword, Meeting the Tormentors in Safeway by the inimitable Alexandra Oliver is one of Michael Lista's four Canadian Poetry Books of the year for 2013, cited for "precision-crafted" poems at once  "[t]heatrical, funny,  [and] formally ingenious."  Also listed alongside the stellar cast of Oliver, Sara Peters and Karen Solie is Amanda Jernigan, author of the much-lauded 2011 Biblioasis debut Groundwork, for her most recent book All the Daylight Hours from Cormorant. Congrats to all!

& for those of you hoping to beckon the thaw with anticipation/wishful thinking, here are The 49th Shelf's most anticipated books of Spring 2014, among which distinguished company you will find mention of not one but two of our forthcoming titles: Novelists, a new short-story collection by the enigmatic C.P. Boyko, and I Was There the Night he Died, the new novel by "the Jerry Lee Lewis of North American letters," Ray Robertson.

Last Week Was Actually Pretty Great.

You wouldn't know it from the Thirsty blog (ahemcoughsorry), but last week was actually a pretty great one over here at the Bibliomanse. So a happy Monday to you all! See below for the movings, shakings, news, reviews, and gossipy tidbits that got our follicles tingling ca. Nov. 11 to Nov. 15th, 2013. On the 16th we at the Bibliomanse celebrated ONE FULL YEAR in our wonderful new bookshop and office, and admittedly got a little distracted preparing for that, but you know what? We had a heckuva good time. Paul Vasey, Bob Duff, and Rino Bortolin joined us for author signings, and—as an extra-special geek treat—we had bookbinder extraordinaire Dan Mezza come in from London to do on-the-spot book appraisals and make repairs suggestions on old volumes. Thanks to the book doctor for making the trip south, and thanks to all of our wonderful customers who came in to support us here at the shop. We couldn't do it without you.

On to the media!

1. We had a lovely endorsement of Ray Robertson's David from the Historical Novel Society, as well as a half-hour interview with Ray with Bill Kenower, editor in chief of Author Magazine, on Author2Author;

2. Mauricio Segura's Eucalyptus was reviewed in the Montreal Review of Books and was named an Editor's Pick/Amazon.ca Top 100 Books of the Year for 2013;

3. Lucie Wilk, whose Strength of Bone was also an Editor's Pick/Amazon Top 100 book, was reviewed in this month's Quill & Quire. Quoth Kamal Al-Solaylee: “If you suppose [The Strength of Bone] is a love story across racial and political lines, you’re underestimating the inventiveness and grace of Lucie Wilk’s meditative debut. Wilk instead works with what is unspoken, hinted at, and left to the imagination … anything but typical.”

4. A "Book News" piece by Annalisa Quinn is circulating on NPR.org and NPR affiliates for Mia Couto's Neustadt win:
Book News: Mozambican Writer Wins Neustadt Prize, 'America's Nobel’: on NPR.org’s “The Two-Way,” Nov. 5
Repeated on WWNO.org, Nov. 13

5. In the wake of the furor surrounding Garth Hallberg’s massive Knopf advance, I thought I’d mention that yep, that is in fact the same Garth who blurbed Traymore so handsomely for The Millions. Traymore was also singled out for its first line over the weekend by the San Francisco Chronicle. 

6. Friday was a lovely wonderful rare day for us here at Biblioasis, with our first full-length poetry review in Michael Lista’s “On Poetry” column. For the poetry enthusiasts out there—heck, for everybody—the whole thing’s worth reading in full. Congratulations to Alexandra Oliver.

“An incredible feat of vision and voice … technically, nothing is out of Oliver’s grasp. Her go-to iambic pentameter can swallow anything in its path. Meeting the Tormentors in Safeway should go a long way toward establishing Oliver as one of the country’s best stanza makers, with a fluidity and ambition aspiring to Dylan Thomas or Yeats … When she succeeds, she succeeds entirely.”

7. Last but not least, the following from KD Miller, whose new collection All Saints will be forthcoming with Biblioasis in Spring 2014:

Recently I was interviewed by CNIB volunteer Ann Saunders for Accessible Media Inc. about my experience of recording some of my own books for The Canadian National Institute for the Blind. Included in the interview are excerpts of me narrating Holy Writ (The Porcupine's Quill, 2001); actor Deborah Kipp narrating Brown Dwarf (Biblioasis, 2010); and Ann Saunders herself narrating The Other Voice (Stonebunny Press, 2011.)
If you'd like to listen in, just click on the word "online" at the end of this sentence: "The November 2013 episode of Choice Words, featuring an interview with K.D. Miller, is available for listening online."

And Now a Word on Alexandra Oliver

Greetings from my cozy desk in the Bibliomanse.

My name is Alicia, I'm a new intern here at Biblioasis and I'm thrilled to be able to bring you important information on our exciting events and authors alongside Melissa.

Today I'm bringing you word on the wonderful poet Alexandra Oliver, who will be reading in Calgary tomorrow evening and across Ontario in the coming weeks. She has been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize as well as for the CBC Literary Award. Her writing has appeared in several journals and publications internationally, including Orbis Rhyme International, Light Quarterly, Future Cycle Poetry, and The Vancouver Sun.You can also find her work in About.com's Poems After the Attack, an anthology of reflection on the 9/11 attacks.

Where the English Housewife Shines, her first book, was released in April 2007. Meeting the Tormentors in Safeway, her latest from Biblioasis, is an exploration on the many faces of domestic life. Her work has been described by fellow writers as “brilliantly contemporary poems in traditional forms,” (Charles Martin) and “poems that bite and entertain” (Jeanne Marie Beaumont).

She can be found dividing her time between Toronto, Canada and Glasgow, Scotland.

Final Request

When I am dressed for heaven, I will wear

no wedding white, no peau de soie or gold

embroidery. Not me. Nor will I hold

a Bible or a snippet of your hair.

I curse the navy twin-set you prepare,

the sulky bow-neck blouse that makes me old.

If you disguise me thus when I am cold,

how will the others recognize me There?

Please put me in the muumuu that I bought

a dozen years ago. The one you hate.

The one that makes you plead with me to change

each time I put it on. I’ve often thought

I’d leave you in a good, embarrassed state

as I do now. So nothing would be strange.

Alexandra will be appearing tomorrow night in Calgary at Words Worth Books at 7 pm with Lucie Wilk. Can't make it? No problem! She will be touring the country throughout October so check the list below and stop in for an evening of words. (That way you can pick up five copies of her book. You know, one each for your mother, your father, your brother, and your dog.) 

Oct 9: Calgary, Pages on Kensington, 7pm


Oct 10: Waterloo, Words Worth Books, 7pm


Oct 15: Peterborough, Trent,
Writers Reading Series, 7pm


Oct 16: London, Poetry London, 7:30pm

Oct 17: London, Fanshawe College, 2:00pm

Oct 17: Toronto, The Garrison, 7pm


Oct 18: Windsor, Biblioasis, 7pm

Oct 22: Toronto, Art Bar Poetry Series, 8pm


Oct 29: New York, Urbana Poetry Slam, 7pm

Want to study up in advance? Here's a link to Alexandra performing at the TIFF Bell Lightbox.

Poets Past & Future

Happy Thursday, all. Those of you plugged into the Facebook have probably seen a couple poesy-themed articles floating about: one by Russell Smith in the Globe, and another by Matt Tierney in the Post. While I'm always happy to see poesy in the press, the latter was especially smile-worthy: one of the young poets "crushing it" is our own Dave Hickey, who was listed as punching above his weight, with a second book that reads like a third. And in other poetry news, Alexandra Oliver, whom we're very excited to say has a book forthcoming with us next year, has an interview on poetry and film out in White Coffee Magazine. Interesting stuff if you get a chance. Plus it includes poems.