Passport - Angela Hibbs (DC Books)

Today's book of poetry:
Passport.  Angela Hibbs.  DC Books.  New Writer's Series.  Montreal, Quebec.  2006.

Today's book of poetry has been out of the office for the last few days attending to family business in Peterborough.  Had we known then what we know now we could have dropped in on Angela Hibbs. Peterborough is quickly getting a reputation as a place where poets are setting up shop.

Passport was published ten years ago but the poetry hasn't aged a day.  Today's book of poetry is embarrassed to admit that Passport is our introduction to Hibbs, and it has only recently come to our attention.

Passport is one hell of a debut book of poetry.  I was totally committed after reading the first poem. The second poem was better than the first, the third poem better than the second.  That went on for several sensational pages.  This woman can burn.

Hibbs does exactly what I want to see, she grabs you by the scruff of the neck and says "Here, eat this!"  It's not arrogance when every damned poem backs it up.  This book is a full course meal.

New Body

For Reuben

I covet my time.

I unplug

the phone.

Arrange the pink pillows

artfully on couch and bed,

cashmere sweater

& velvet

panties,

paint toenails red,

check spine visibility

in the wall mirror,

stare at the digital time display,

stand on feet

then head,

feel the blood

move. I am a Chevette

in a Cadillac body; I

stumble around

a hotel suite

in a town where I have

an apartment; I

sip vodka through ice.

Nobody impresses me.

I draw straight lines

with magazine spines

to guide me.

There is a lot to be done

by Wednesday.

The days are not long

enough for all I have

to say to myself.

...

Hibbs employs a Newfoundland sensibility of humorous certainty as she explores the tension wires on which we suspend our relationships.  This is compelling and clever stuff driven by characters that are as bold as brass.

Dear Maria Callas,

Born Kalogeropoulos

With your birth name I invoke you.

Listening to you sing La mamma morta,

the recording sounds

like it always has.

Your mother said she wouldn't

give you the lice off her head.

With a note you could break

all the windows in the hall.

You could throb your heart

at a frequency that would explode mine,

like glass.

Though it is not.

...

This morning's read had some serious spirit to it.  Kathryn, our Jr. Editor, felt a particular connections to Hibbs and proceeded to run the show.  Kathryn gave each poem a quick silent read and then told us which of us was to read that poem.  It was an office first and it worked.

We can thank Hibbs for that.  Hibbs poems roll off of the page, roll off of your tongue, run roughshod given half a chance.

Egyptology

A discreet incision near the hipbone,

for evisceration, replacing

only the dehydrated heart; they liquefied

the brain with palm wine, poured it out.

Unearthed, a mummy's skin,

slightly orange

perfectly intact.

My mother announces

cremation is not for her; she speaks

now for a time when she won't.

She says she may need her body

in the afterlife.

I put dibs on her birthstone ring.

When my uncle Thom died

the mortician put so much make-up

on him, he left this life a stranger.

I thought we were in the wrong room,

I wiped some of the paint off

with a Kleenex; he was perfumed.

I must mummify my mother:

touch each organ.

Palm wine to wash the stomach cavity,

aromatic plants to dry,

fill with myrrh or perfumed sawdust. Carefully

replace her heart.

...

Angela Hibbs first book is a highly polished, fully achieved, emotional corkscrew.  These intelligent poems crack the whip.

Since publishing Passport in 2006 Hibbs has published Wanton (Insomniac Press, 2010) and Sin Eater (ARP Books, 2014).  Passport is sterling stuff, Today's book of poetry can only imagine the other two are killers.

Angela Hibbs

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Angela Hibbs is the author of three poetry collections, Passport (DC Books, 2006) Wanton (Insomniac Press, 2009) and Sin Eater (ARP Books, 2014). She holds a MA creative writing from Concordia University. Her work appeared in the Poetry Is Public Is Poetry installation at the Toronto Reference Library. She was awarded the 2010 Joseph S. Stauffer Prize.

BLURB

"In this auspicious debut collection, Angela Hibbs writes with tender insight and passionate care. These are poems which incant the sensuous particulars of place and, proceeding with the sensibility

that poetry is always for real, insist upon boring through walls and, then, beneath the skin."

     - David McGimpsey

Angela Hibbs

The Hearthside Hearings Present: Angela Hibbs July 2010 pt1

video: viporinatree

dcbooks.ca

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DISCLAIMERS

Poems cited here are assumed to be under copyright by the poet and/or publisher.  They are shown here for publicity and review purposes.  For any other kind of re-use of these poems, please contact the listed publishers for permission.

We here at TBOP are technically deficient and rely on our bashful Milo to fix everything.  We received notice from Google that we were using "cookies"

and that for our readers in Europe there had to be notification of the use of those "cookies.  Please be aware that TBOP may employ the use of some "cookies" (whatever they are) and you should take that into consideration.

If I Were In A Cage I'd Reach Out For You - Adèle Barclay (Nightwood Editions)

Today's book of poetry:

If I Were In A Cage I'd Reach Out For You. 

Adèle Barclay.  Nightwood Editions.  Gibsons, British Columbia.  2016.

If I Were In A Cage I'd Reach Out For You is the sort of title/line you want to write out on a piece of paper and hang it on the wall.  As it turns out - reaching out to you is exactly what Adèle Barclay does in this spanky first book.

Today's book of poetry would be lying if I were to say I could follow Barclay footstep for footstep with any certainty.  If I Were In A Cage I'd Reach Out For You is a curious beauty.  If I stumbled and missed a few turns you're going to have to excuse me.  To quote the electric Adèle Barclay, "I'm drunk, and I love you."

The Latest Summer

I will go into the latest summer

and learn how to bow down

to American heat.

I don't part the humid air

when I move through streets

it wavers for me because of my thirst.

I've done this before

picked figs, tucked cigarettes

into a turquoise pouch.

Sunless bathers adrift in the drought

later or sooner the sky

pulls up a chair

and it's not like you can

ask about the weather anymore

and expect sympathy when

units of time are expanding to include

melancholy. I'm sorry I said

I had done this before.

...

Adèle Barclay is running barefoot over burning coals and whistling Dixie while she does it.  These poems rollick with ribald tenderness, they fishtail like a drunken driver in a lucid dream. 

What these poems do with astonishing regularity is to spill out lines of such surprising and newly necessary verve that the reader takes an extra breath, a gasp.  Barclay has some sharp tools and uses them.

Barclay seems to have a deep well of two-line knock-out punch moves, she goes magically metaphorical on command to broach time and space.  The reader thinks she is being playful when in fact she is lining us up in her sights.

Corridors

I'm trying to think what yokes the Pacific Northwest and the Baltics--

witchery, rain, chanterelles and moss.

Today I ate the broth of a chicken with an egg in it.

Yesterday I asked for strength, picked fleas out of the IKEA rug.

Tomorrow I will fry

the last crumbs of my libido in duck fat.

I am offering my enemies a bear

made from carob and my long dead hair.

...

This morning's read was another spirited rodeo.  Kathryn, our Jr. Editor, took a particular liking to If I Were In A Cage I'd Reach Out For You and once she got going she wouldn't give up the floor.  We usually take turns, everyone reads a poem and then passes the book on.  Not today, Kathryn was on Barclay's wavelength, dialed completely in.

Adèle Barclay has that rare gift of making something entirely new feel familiar, every door she opens we want to swoon right in.

Cardinal Versus Mutable

Katie, there's a lynx

across the street

or some animal

that is ambiguously

both feline and canine.

It's too dark to tell

and I'm so tired

I can't even curate

a good life

you know about blisters

from skiing

up a mountain

for three days

through avalanche terrain

and I know from dancing

at Red Gate until 3 a.m. --

either way it's good practice

to wash the bloody fitted sheet

before a stranger comes over,

but sometimes

I don't. Sometimes I do

see a world

where our bodies fit,

the depth of it is excruciating.

I said you were a heron

because I met you

on an island,

but now I think you might

be a comet--

a force rather than

a product of nature,

flight as in burning

and destination.

Please tell me the blisters

are worth the salt

I soaked them in, the path

I winced walking home,

the sheets I ruined.

...

Adèle Barclay's If I Were In A Cage I'd Reach Out For You is a debut we will all remember. These are intelligent, vibrant and exciting poems hard wired with a dark winged angel circling overhead.

Adèle Barclay

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Adèle Barclay’s poems have appeared in The Fiddlehead, PRISM international, Matrix, The Pinch and others. Her debut poetry collection, If I Were in a Cage I’d Reach Out for You, was shortlisted for the 2015 Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry. She is the Interviews Editor at The Rusty Toque.

BLURB

"With a depth of feeling for places and their connecting joys and aches, these are beautifully written poems, vivid as the morning paper, bracing as moonshine."

     - David McGimpsey, author of Asbestos Heights   

  "Dear Sara"

Adèle Barclay

Video courtesy of N Moore

nightwoodeditions.com

525

DISCLAIMERS

Poems cited here are assumed to be under copyright by the poet and/or publisher.  They are shown here for publicity and review purposes.  For any other kind of re-use of these poems, please contact the listed publishers for permission.

We here at TBOP are technically deficient and rely on our bashful Milo to fix everything.  We received notice from Google that we were using "cookies"

and that for our readers in Europe there had to be notification of the use of those "cookies.  Please be aware that TBOP may employ the use of some "cookies" (whatever they are) and you should take that into consideration.

Asbestos Heights - David McGimpsey (Coach House Press)

Today's book of poetry:
Asbestos Heights - The Canonical Notebooks.  David McGimpsey.  Coach House Press.  Toronto, Ontario.  2015.

You just can't stop reading David McGimpsey once you start, his poems are like potato chips you've kept in the freezer, perfect salty and crisp.  

Asbestos Heights is what happens when one of the best poets in the land riffs in hungry excitement. Trying to tell you what it is about would be like pointing to a set of encyclopedia set in witty type, a baseball box-score sheet in strict limerick form and all the menus from all of the best burger joints from here to end of time, and saying "here, read this."

Pomegranate

There are two kinds of people in the world:

those who say they love to eat pomegranates

and those who tell the truth. But, yes, they're red,

and healthy foods taste either red or red.

Steak, cherry popsicle, red velvet cake.

Full of such health, I stayed up all summer

sketching a fringe play called Dangling Apricocks

and collapsing somewhere near Jolicoeur.

When somebody looks over their glasses and says,

'Look at it this way, m'sieur, you have a scar

but at least you still have most of your face,'

what can you say but, 'D'you like daiquiris?'

Healthy red medicines, or even those blushed

Pepto pink, die in the Canadian cold;

you can't keep Diet Coke at home for fear

the deliciousness will dull you to God.

...

These poems are peppered with characters like "Herman 'Babe' Melville" and McGimpsey cracks me up.  I guess you could say that there is baseball in here, you'd have say it, but it would be a bit like saying that there's hockey in the Canadian dream.  Baseball is just one of McGimpsey's personae.  It could just as easily be astronomy - McGimpsey is going to soar regardless up into that stratosphere where we, the reader, simply want more.

Take this morning's reading.  Milo simply would not sit down.  Of course every poem he read sounded like a love poem and he was aiming them all at Kathryn.  It was very touching and very funny, Milo was playing the giant ham in love and it was endearing.  Milo's reading and McGimpsey's poems have left everyone in the office feeling better.  Somehow these poems imbue the reader with some of the poet's confidence.  How charming is that?

Walt Whitman

Whitman saw great things in the 'game of base'

and predicted that one day there'd be a team

in Albany called the Angel-Snappers

who would play shirtless in the summer sun.

When the rules disallowed 'soaking'

(throwing a runner out by throwing at him),

the fun of Whitman's game was gone,

and he died good in Camden, New Jersey.

Nineteenth-century baseball, as you know,

featured spectacular mustachio play

and ad endorsements were for 'stropping,'

'hamboiling,' 'stonerail fixing' and 'unsnaking,'

Whitman's baseball rap has no real substance,

of course; his thoughts on the game exist

to comfort all washed-up peanut-tossers,

long assured they were unfit for poetry.

...

David "The Crown Prince of Canadian Poetry" McGimpsey is going to absolutely delight his current legion of fans with Asbestos Heights and gain new poetry armies of followers from anyone who opens the book.

Today's book of poetry is convinced that no poet in Canada, or anywhere else for that matter, writes with more joy than our esteemed David McGimpsey.  These poems sparkle with Coltranesque wit, McGimpsey riffs through scales that include all the known notes and a few of his own.  It is splendid stuff.

Canadian poet Gwendolyn MacEwen kept four wrens in

her apartment in Toronto, once even sewing little Beatles

outfits for them.

Daily, I curl into whatever fries

and curd combination keeps me alive,

and by alive I just mean witlessly

reply-tweeting to Alyssa Milano.

I'm not saying I suddenly got too old.

I was too old years ago. That was clear

when I started buying things - anything -

that promised cheap relief of ankle pain.

My mother would cry if she knew how

much money I waste on taxis. I pray

I get through lunch without hearing someone

say, 'I, the Duke of Poetry, spit on you!'

I cry when I listen to those country songs

written at the height of the Iraq War.

I mean, those are the only things that ever

move me to tears now that my friends are gone.

...

Today's book of poetry declares today David McGimpsey Day!  These poems will swipe that smile right off of your face and replace it with a smirk.

O Captain, my Captain!

NOTE:  You have to read what Michael Robbins says in the BLURB below.  What he said.

David McGimpsey

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

David McGimpsey is the author of five collections of poetry includingLi'l Bastard which was named one of the 'books of the year' by both theQuill & Quire and the National Post and was shortlisted for Canada's Governor General's Award. He is also the author of the short fiction collection Certifiable and the award-winning critical study Imagining Baseball: America's Pastime and Popular Culture. Named by the CBC as one of the 'Top Ten English language poets in Canada,' his work was also the subject of the book of essays Population Me: Essays on David McGimpsey. He lives in Montréal.

BLURB
"David McGimpsey is unfuckwithable, poetrywise, and I'll stand on John Ashbery's coffee table in my cowboy boots and say that."
     -  Michael Robbins

David McGimpsey

Reads at the opening night of VERSeFest

2011, Ottawa, Ontario

video: versefest's channel

chbooks.com 

432

DISCLAIMERS

Poems cited here are assumed to be under copyright by the poet and/or publisher.  They are shown here for publicity and review purposes.  For any other kind of re-use of these poems, please contact the listed publishers for permission.

We here at TBOP are technically deficient and rely on our bashful Milo to fix everything.  We received notice from Google that we were using "cookies"

and that for our readers in Europe there had to be notification of the use of those "cookies.  Please be aware that TBOP may employ the use of some "cookies" (whatever they are) and you should take that into consideration.

Peeling Rambutan - Gillian Sze (Gaspereau Press)

Today's book of poetry:
Peeling Rambutan.  Gillian Sze.  Gaspereau Press.  Kentville, Nova Scotia.
2014.

FOR SABERA

"sorrow becomes a friend if it hangs
around long enough"
                                --from East is the Sun Behind a Tree
                                           Gillian Sze

Back on October 14, 2014, Today's book of poetry (blog #257), I had the pleasure of writing about Gillian Sze's utterly illuminating second book, The Anatomy of Clay.  Peeling Rambutan feels and reads as though it were written by a different poet - but one of equally fascinating and obvious talent.

Whereas there was a lightness to The Anatomy of Clay, an almost casual brilliance - Peeling Rambutan has weight.  It is full of focused energy and power.  But it is never too heavy.  This balancing act takes game.

Once again, Gillian Sze is dazzling.

Come

and show me our various forms of leaving. By boat, by foot,
by the flash of our thumbs. By storm, by nightfall, by the
infant hours. Play me the heave of a train horn pushing
through the dark. Show me how a railway crossing rises as
easily and slowly as a dancer lifting one leg. Show me the
silent lightning, as if the sky surrendered, and we're waiting
for ash. Tell me that someone has already seen this and is
still looking up. Tell me how to prepare for the weather next
Saturday. tell me how to reduce stories to their simplest
parts. Tell me again our various forms of leaving. With the
engine running. With joy, avidity, stifled regret. Tell me how
the rooms fell silent. Faces looming in the back window.
The eye falling to the fence. Tell me about two-toned living.
The incompatibility of temper. the worlds you worked to
unite. the tumbling languages that refused to stay aloft. The
ground-bound postscripts. The plummeted paper planes.

...

Many of the poems in this third book of poetry by Sze are prose poems - and yet they flow easily enough, slide off of your tongue as though by design.

Contemplative is a good word to describe these precise poems of captured moments.  Like you are constantly walking into rooms of new discovery.  The edges are clear, reading them is like watching one of those old Polaroid photos come into focus in front of your eyes.

Garage Band

In Wen Chong Village, beneath a small light,
a group of old men settle on their plastic chairs.
Cradling their instruments,
they smoke cigarettes
and drink kung fu tea to defeat the dark.
Inside, their women fret over what to prepare
and pack for next day's lunch.
Outside, a weathered man stands to face his players
and wavers out a Canton opera,
spitting during the interludes,
and picking up at his cues.

...

Once again I have to mention Gary Dunfield & Andrew Steeves.  This book continues Gaspereau's tradition of making the most beautiful books of poetry that Today's book of poetry sees.  Looks shouldn't matter to poetry - but Gaspereau gives all other poetry presses something to aspire to.

How To Kill A Cockroach

Without qualm,
she peers at the bottom of her shoe and says,
Never let a cockroach see your hand's shadow.

...

Peeling Rambutan is a travelogue of sorts that takes you inside the minds and language of foreign people and places that you will most likely never see - and leaves you feeling like you've been there.

That's a great trick.  Bravo Gillian.

Gillian Sze

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Gillian Sze is the author of two previous collections: The Anatomy of Clay (2011) and Fish Bones (2009). Her work has appeared in a number of national and international journals, and has received awards such as the University of Winnipeg Writers’ Circle Prize and the 2011 3Macs carte blanche Prize. Originally from Winnipeg, she now resides in Montreal.

BLURBS

Peeling Rambutan traces a young poet's journey into the interior of China, a place where "religion is a game of telephone and illumination," where epiphany is found in ancestral kitchens. Sze shows us a luminous, lyric landscape where old village vendors ride into Shanghai singing in rhyming couplets. What a beautiful, unforgettable trip reading this book is!

—MARY DI MICHELE, author of The Flower of Youth

Gillian Sze's Peeling Rambutan is an unforgettably vivid collection, combining her characteristic intimacy with subjects and a gut-punching instinct to get it across. Richly detailed with uncommon knowledge and observance, poised in articulation and always present. Gillian Sze is one of our most enchanting poets.

—DAVID MCGIMPSEY, author of L'il Bastard

Gillian Sze's voice is so assured and so clear. She sets out to explore where she is from, where "Here can't be found on a map," and then sends the images our way. She records, and then tattles in the best of ways: with curiosity and awe and humour. I felt at times that I was reading a novelist writing brilliant poetry. That is to say, these poems are busy with story. I loved them.

—DAVID BERGEN, author of The Age of Hope

Gillian Sze's sensuous, precisely-observed poems trace her identity across cultures, eras and continents, weaving together scraps of family lore, visits to changing landscapes, the smell of Malaysian fruits and Canadian snow. Her far-flung home, often in the air, often lonely and built from memory is of a sort many of us share. The poems in Peeling Rambutan enlarge our sense of who we are.

—JOHN STEFFLER, author of Lookout

Gillian Sze reads from The Anatomy of Clay\

video from ECW Press

gaspereaupress.com 

292

Poems cited here are assumed to be under copyright by the poet and/or publisher.  They are shown here for publicity and review purposes.  For any other kind of re-use of these poems, please contact the listed publishers for permission.