Buffet World
- Donato Mancini
- Publication date: 2010-10-15
Visually and conceptually dynamic, Buffet World is Donato Mancini's collection of poems about food, trade and life under late–late–capitalism.
Exploring the relationships between industrial food production, eating, culture and the politics of language, Mancini organises his controlled palette of words and images around metaphors of consumption and the formal device of the list. The numbers and statistics that fill the book stand as a critique of the grotesquely inhumane scales of capitalist production today – in–kind retort to the brutality of economic–fundamentalist abstractions that increasingly determine policy and regulate inner lives.
Incisive humour permeates Buffet World. The poems capture Mancini's diamond wit, as well as his dissatisfaction with the conditions of a world built on so many systemic cruelties. Buffet World underlines our inescapable complicity as (constantly) both victims and victimisers in a system that should leave us choked with rage, but more often dazzles us with a surreal spectacle of false hope.
The images in Buffet World are colourful and almost garish. The words are, in true Mancini fashion, brilliantly manipulated. Equally concerned with the violence done to our planet, our bodies and imaginations, these poems perform a deep critique, but remain accessible and fun to read.
Caprice
- George Bowering
- Publication date: 2010-10-15
With a Foreword by Aritha van Herk
It's the mid 1890s in Kamloops, British Columbia. Two men argue over a bottle of whisky and in the struggle Frank Spencer, an American outlaw–turned–farmhand, kills Pete Foster, a French–Canadian and fellow farmhand.
Enter Caprice: a vision and a brain. Almost six feet tall, with flaming red hair and long legs, and toting a lethal bullwhip, she sets out to avenge her brother's murder. Travelling with her beloved black Spanish stallion, Caprice trails her brother's murderer to Mexico and back. Determined and headstrong as she is smart, she leaves an impression on the people she encounters in her journey: Gert, the whore with a heart of gold; Gert's son, for whom she provides affi rmation, and not the least Frank Smith, her lover, a teacher and amateur baseball player who wants her to leave the law enforcement to the professionals and marry him.
Caprice finally comes face to face with her brother's murderer at Deadman's Falls.
First published in 1987 and based on actual events in BC's history, Caprice is a witty, adventurous and colourful recreation of a Canadian heroine's quest in avenging her brother's murder, a woman well ahead of her times, who refused to be pigeonholed into a stereotype, who questioned authority and did so with unflinching resolve.
Caprice is a companion to Bowering's Burning Water and Shoot!, reissued by New Star in 2007 and 2008.
City of Love and Revolution
- Lawrence Aronsen
- Publication date: 2010-10-15
City of Love and Revolution takes readers back to Vancouver in the sixties, the decade when everything changed for the Baby Boomer generation. Dozens of rare photos accompany Lawrence Aronsen's account of the tumultuous decade, bringing to life the sights, the sounds, and the passions of the era of psychedelia and free love, when for a brief moment in time everything seemed possible.
Aronsen tells the story of the spread of the "hippie" lifestyle north from San Francisco into Vancouver, and how this rocked the buttoned–down, Protestant, white–bread frontier town that Vancouver had been up til then. A chapter on the impact of the sexual revolution tells of love–ins, free clinics, public nudism, and the Penthouse and other Vancouver fleshpots. Other chapters recount the stories of the drugs and music that were embraced by the new generation of Vancouverites; of peaceful anti–war protesters and the birth of Greenpeace, and the harder edge of the Yippies and their occupations and street theatre; and of Vancouver Free University and the new ideas that forever changed the way our schools work.
Aronsen's readable account is illustrated with over 100 photos, drawings, and advertisements drawn from the newspapers — both straight and Georgia Straight — that chronicled the era.
Every Day in the Morning (slow)
- Adam Seelig
- Publication date: 2010-09-15
Every Day in the Morning (slow) is a work that looks and reads like no other.
Sam, a composer, reflects on his floundering career, life with his lover and tensions with his father. Some thoughts, like facial hair and breakfast, are mundane; others, like love, money and war, are often overwhelming. At turns laughable and vain, at others, tender and considered, Sam's feelings and ideas turn continuously. The result is an oddly lyrical streamof– consciousness that's as conversational as its appearance is unconventional.
Few words and the generous white space on each page invite a distinct interaction with the text, one where every detail, every placement and every repetition influences meaning. The lack of punctuation allows the reader the freedom to internalize this exquisitely crafted work and understand the protagonist's state of mind.
The exceptional style of Every Day in the Morning (slow) amounts to a kind of thinging, somewhere between singing and thinking, thing and thought, utter brilliance and complete crap. A novella with long poem features, slow breaks the rules of both genres, while at the same time offering an addictive and compulsive flow that may make it the fastest book you will ever (want to) read.
Sweet England
- Steve Weiner
- Publication date: 2010-10-15
Steve Weiner's harrowing portrayal of post–Thatcher England follows a man of no known origin and unstable personality and his efforts to re–enter society after a long and unexplained absence.
The reader sees events through Jack's mostly uncomprehending eyes as he negotiates the margins of a London that resembles the city of memory and story only in incidental details. Replete with episodes of manic religion and delusions, the world in Sweet England is hard, dark, dangerous. Exploitation and violence provide a steady background glow that illuminates Jack's relationship with Brenda, with whom he is living, drinking, brawling, and loving.
Weiner's London is equally a protagonist of his story. Dirty, sombre, the city is a palimpsest, the contemporary curry houses and mosques reinscribing the landscape dotted with old churches, monuments and graveyards that invoke old England's Christian saints and glorious past.
Phantasmagoric and allegorical, and told largely through dialogue, Sweet England's vision will haunt the reader long after they put down this compelling book.
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