Today we welcome two new poetry collections to the New Star shelves!
Join us for launch celebrations at the People’s Co-op Bookstore (1391 Commercial Drive, Vancouver) on Friday April 12 at 7PM!
The Goldberg Variations by Clint Burnham
The Goldberg Variations takes as its organizing principle the idea of contingency – the world thrown into Being that the poet encounters – and variation, or Bach’s looping, recombinant system, as a way to turn into verse what shows up in the Notes app. And varied these poems are: appearing on the page as sonnets and columns, big and small, wide at the bottom and skinny on top (like Vancouver condos). Made of jargon, of slang or invective, pop culture or politics, sampling the overheard, the raw material of language organized anew and composed for a different kind of keyboard.
CLINT BURNHAM is a poet and academic from Comox, British Columbia. His recent books include Pound @ Guantanamo, and White Lie. Burnham’s writing has appeared in The Capilano Review, Artforum, The Globe and Mail, and The Vancouver Sun.
Tomorrow is a Holiday by Hamish Ballantyne
These poems sit as much on the mountainside as they do on city streets. Resisting the urge of revelation in favour of idiomatic observation, Tomorrow is a Holiday brims with restless curiosity, trees felled or still standing, electricity in the streets, mossy chainlink fences, sea dwellers and city figures in lowercase, and Hamish Ballantyne serves as a witness at the margins of it all.
HAMISH BALLANTYNE is a poet and translator based on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples (Vancouver, Canada). He works in the Downtown Eastside and as a commercial mushroom picker. Ballantyne has published two chapbooks, Imitation Crab and Blue Knight. Tomorrow is a Holiday is his first full length collection.