Nomados Literary Publishers - Catalogue
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The Ends of the Earth by Jacqueline Turner Poetry 40 pp ISBN 978-0-9810952-3-3 @ $10.00
Jacqueline Turner’s work has long impressed with its fine wit and crisp sound textures. She has now gone to the ends of the earth. There, on the furthest extremity, midst the debris of a shipwrecked contemporary world, she writes mash notes to the social heart of language where you/we will either sink or swim—together and alone. “Tantalizing by degrees of omission,” these tiny apertures in the possible lead us towards the minimal light. You/we will fall in love with what is found there, or else lose our way home again. Steve Collis
Turner’s The Ends of the Earth imagines natural erosions and erasures as acceptable and probable at the same time as it refutes a culture of catastrophism and a poetics of evacuation, wherein the subject atomizes away from the densities of daily experience. In this both poignant and wry meditation on the social, addresses are made to requisite shifts of grammar, both in terms of relational enunciations that must be honed and the subject’s fervent readiness for lived and imagined translocations. Margaret Christakos
—that can’t by Louis Cabri Poetry 36 pp ISBN 978-0-9810952-2-6 @ $10.00
As foams forms, —that can’t uproots the signposts of grammatical abstraction and forces the reader to rely on the echoes of fellow travellers for direction. Thus Cabri sounds the (seemingly) superficial and finds the social, inviting us to the task of recognizing—or is it refiguring?—what’s around us. Mark Truscott
From grapheme to phoneme to foameme, Cabri's para-linguistic materiality is a timely contrast/adjustment to the current shift towards a neo-solid-state phraseology (the re-allocation of “found” complete sentences and paragraphs). This poetic writing extends the wave-particle function analogy of matter to poetics in order to harness the social-political at the micron level while giving wider meaning to deep drifts in history. Rodrigo Toscano
Eggs in the Basement by Larissa Lai Poetry 40 pp ISBN 978-0-9810952-1-9 @ $10.00
Eggs in the Basement is a brilliant instance of the contrapuntal improvisation that can occur between writing and thinking. In this long poem Larissa Lai develops these linguistic clefts with such acute awareness and intelligence that each poetic shift triggers a new and surprising message, relentless in an absorption of the cascade of signals at the threshold of potential meaning.
Eggs in the Basement is an exercise in how to trace the counterpoint of thinking between pronoun and verb, subject and predicate; in short, how to write a two-part invention using the complete thought of the sentence to generate poetic ironies that focus on the spun out complexities of doing two things at the same time, like writing while driving the Coquihalla in a snowstorm. Fred Wah
Spun from a source text generated in a writing exercise, Eggs in the Basement takes this initial set of linguistic, social, geographical, and political constrictions to recombine into poems that perform the possibilities of expression and affect. In this relationship of limit and possibility, this book (which is so aware of its historical moment) works through the everyday terrains of the social and the poetic. It is a book that travels parallel to the forms of freedom (and their negation through consent and force) that liberal democracy slyly serves up in its language of consent. Jeff Derksen
Procedure-in-a-round, Eggs in the Basement ticks the metronome of everyday diction through looped words and known notions. Text, repeated, collides and colludes meaning, lyric echoic, fierce. Disjunctive narrative swallows its own tail and births eggs into itself. Dim the light and consume immediately. a.rawlings
Aviva by Nicole Brossard trans. by Anne-Marie Wheeler Poetry 48 pp Bilingual Edition ISBN 978-0-9810952-0-2 @ $10.00
The excess Nicole Brossard courts in these desirous pairs of poems plays always on two levels, of and for writing, of and for the aroused lesbian body. And at last we have an exciting translation of L’Aviva in Anne-Marie Wheeler’s poems that capture the musical mirroring and taut semantic play of Brossard’s sequence. Daphne Marlatt
Fulgencio by George Bowering Poetry 36 pp ISBN 978-0-9781072-9-1 @ $10.00
What a necessary poem this is, as USAmericans look for a new President and Cubans without Castro try to keep what they have so hard-won. The grotesque dead hand of Fulgencio Batista y Zaldívar and the deadening grasp of the United Fruit Company, tyrannies of the past right here right now, wrong now, wrong always, implacably here always, the raw sugar of greed lurking beneath the poem’s flat matter-of-fact absurdity, grim comedy’s helpless outrage skittering over monstrous abuse of capital power. Compelling writing, the links between poetry and the political here inescapable. Bowering at his best. Peter Quartermain
Sporatic Growth by Jay MillAr (2006) Poetry 28 pp ISBN 0-9781072-3-3; ISBN 978-0-9781072-3-9 $8.00
Here is another tendril breaking through the page. That is to say, no one writes like Jay MillAr. Here, language propagates, perfectly patterned as a leaf on a stem. One would no sooner ask a seed why and where it lands. I love Jay's work. Sporatic Growth is gorgeous to look at...and he makes it look so easy! This latest project reminds me a little of the work of Danish poet Niels Lyngsø: there's the same organic movement between facing pages, that same irreverence—but the vision is pure MillAr. Jay is truly one of the few poets writing in Canada today who can make me howl one moment and stand at attention the next. So funny, and so beautiful. Elizabeth Bachinsky
MillAr is concerned with poetic tradition. And this tradition is the breaking with tradition....This is the poetry of the plenipotential where in secret witness we experience inscrutable otherness. MillAr’s poetry purely states that this is a participatory universe, and within that language is complicit. Kemeny Babineau
Adult Video by Margaret Christakos (2006) 26 pp ISBN 0-9735337-7-3; ISBN 978-0-9735337-7-4 $8.00
In the densening recombinations of Margaret Christakos's Adult Video, the poet plays loop-de-loop with a teeming cast of characters, or demi-characters, women with names and families whose outline remains enigmatically opaque. Gertie, Tammy, Meg, Samantha, Elizabeth. It's a world where letters and initials stand in for conjunctions and pronouns; where, as Britney Spears sang, while still a virgin, I'm a slave 4 U. Margaret Christakos, a poet of labour, is in addition a brilliant thinker on sexuality and its uses. Adult Video takes on the antiseptics and anapestics of a male-driven Oulipean procedural vision, and pulls them inside out until, finally, something ratty and valuable lets itself show and moan. Kevin Killian
Cold Trip by Nancy Shaw & Catriona Strang 28 pp ISBN 0-9735337-6-5; ISBN 978-0-9735337-6-7 $8.00
This season offers its coldest pronoun. In the year 2005, the human subject is sold for oil, bound with fear and gagged with dumb longing.
Shaw and Strang loosen the pronominal wire. In Cold Trip, the tragic lyric is resung and unsung. Repetition shifts the I's bind and the subject finds relief in the civic wide surface of words – "each current/ will win me/ each surface also." Each tilting word edge is the subject's end and its agency—the music of identity and its unraveling. So, sing I thus, and in the warmth of the possible and in the sorrow of the uncertainty, "the glowing might be named." Christine Stewart
Ready for Freddy by Renee Rodin (2005) 36 pp ISBN 0-9735337-5-7; ISBN 978-0-9735337-5-0 $10.00
Despite having been diagnosed with cancer several months before, my father remained healthy. Sandy and I, Abe's only children, had been told he probably wouldn't last another year but he had not wanted to hear the prognosis. He just kept telling everyone "I'm going to beat it." . . .
Candid and often funny, Ready for Freddy is a story about siblings and their elderly parent. It is riveting and rich -- a new take on a classic theme.
Rewriting My Grandfather by George Bowering (2005) 36 pp ISBN 0-9735337-4-9 @ $10.00 A few copies of this are back in stock.
One night in his youth, after a great many beers, George Bowering wrote a poem about his grandfather which has since appeared in countless anthologies. It is not Bowering's favorite poem, by a long shot. Rewriting My Grandfather tells us why this young-man's grandfather poem cannot go on unchallenged, and puts Grandfather through some inventive milling machines.
Weeping Willow by Sharon Thesen (2005) 27 pp ISBN 0-9735337-3-0; ISBN 978-0-9735337-3-6 $8.00.
Twelve exquisite poems – wry, gossipy, yet deeply felt – recall long-time friend Angela Bowering.
Rousseau's Boat by Lisa Robertson (2004) 40 pp ISBN 0-9735337-1-4; ISBN 978-0-9735337-1-2 $10.00. WINNER OF THE 2004 BP NICHOL CHAP-BOOK AWARD
The ebb and flow of this water, its ongoing sound swelling with vibration that set adrift my outer senses, rhythmically took the place of the strong emotions my dreaminess had calmed, and I felt in myself so pleasurably and effortlessly the sensation of existing, without troubling to think. Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Good Egg Bad Seed by Susan Holbrook (2004) 16 pp ISBN 0-9735337-0-6; ISBN 978-0-9735337-0-5 $10.00.
Starting with the premise “There are two kinds of people,” Susan Holbrook drives supermarket existentialism through its own vortex and gives it a nifty orgasmic twist into hyperspace. Here’s a ping pong game you’ll never forget – where the tables keep flipping and players’ ironic bats spin the banal into deadly mischievous curves.
World on Fire by Charles Bernstein (2004) 24 pp ISBN 0-9731521-9-2; ISBN 978-0-9731521-9-7 $10.00.
Bernstein, like Ashbery, is concerned with the ways in which different modes of language fashion our conceptions of the ordinary, indeed the ways in which different modes of language are the ordinary in which we live . . . . Bernstein's poetry, with its odd humor and its calculated resistance to repetition and personal narrative, provides us with a rich exploration of new modes of meaning-making in poetry. (Hank Lazer on Bernstein's Dark City)
World on Fire looks at the possibilities for existence in a world where billboards fill the sky and household names rain down with torrential indifference; there is no escape from this “indelible vanishing.” The trick, Charles Bernstein shows us, is to meet the inferno with exhilarating wit and verve, humorous plays on familiar phrasing, and nifty substitutions (“It’s still the same old lorry”) as we fly our spaceships along the language tracks available to us, production/consumption’s conveyor belting our dreams of paradise. Comedy attending dark strata, refusing closure all the way, these poems are deadly serious. And linger.
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Click here for Ron Silliman's Review of World on Fire
The Irreparable by Robin Blaser (2003). Articulating philosophy at the core of his poetics, this poem-essay by Robin Blaser considers the work of Giorgio Agamben and others in relation to the terrifying world events of our time. 32 pp ISBN 0-9731521-1-7; ISBN 978-0-9731521-1-1 $10.00. $10.00.
Who else but a poet, and not just any poet but Canada’s Robin Blaser, could take on that word “transcendence” and recuperate it in the moment of a civic frame, one with the capacity to restore us to the “world” restless in world, the “where is” which is where we abide. If those politicians and armies who use transcendence as motor for religious fundamentalisms would only grasp Blaser’s “transcendence,” thought in the company of Giorgio Agamben, Jean-Luc Nancy and John Berger, the irreparable of this world would be trust and habitation instead of harm.
That transcendence is here and now, is the profane world and its beauty: what a thought. Again Blaser gives courage with his language and care. Erín Moure
Seven Glass Bowls by Daphne Marlatt (2003). 24 pp
ISBN 0-9731521-5-X; ISBN 978-0-9731521-5-9. $10.00.
“Home and the closeness of the beloved,” she writes. There can be no subject as important to the poet and the rest of us, and in this lovely poem, Daphne Marlatt continuously achieves her best yet “homing in.” That present participle is our sweet clue to a mystery we are encouraged to enter. Gladly. George Bowering
Wanders (2002). Nineteen poems by Robin Blaser with nineteen responses by Meredith Quartermain. 40 pp ISBN 0-9731521-0-9; ISBN 978-0-9731521-0-4. $10.00.
I like the quickness and dedicated flittingness of Meredith’s responses, so determined to alight on Robin’s syllabics. They’re stunning. A spring-coiled peck from Dickinson on the pitch-perfect cheek of Marianne Moore. Daniel Comiskey
"an amazing, even jaw dropping performance . . . . her poems absolutely stand up to the challenge of Blaser's own . . . . The sum of it is totally exhilarating. . . ." Ron Silliman
A Thousand Mornings (2002). Prose poems about daily life in Vancouver's oldest neighbourhood by Meredith Quartermain. 90 pp ISBN 0-9731521-2-5; ISBN 978-0-9731521-2-8. $10.00.
Meredith Quartermain has really struck gold with A Thousand Mornings, a serious-playful and engaging work in which she weighs and sounds what presents itself outside a real window, inside language, and through verbal-emotional associations. Written in pointillist phrases, diaristic, notational, associative, punning, funning and just following any track, the work sits down to itself: to the world, and to the self in time. It considers all the little bits and details of domestic life and the thinking these can engender. "Looking out of the window of my room is a window looking out my head." This work creates an osmotic border between seeing and writing, a realist hypnogogic passage between memory and today, between outside and inside, between now and then. That anywhere is everywhere is proven once again with this brave, enchanting book. Rachel Blau DuPlessis
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