Attention Span 2010 – Susan Holbrook

Robert Kroetsch | Completed Field Notes | U of Alberta P | 2000

This collection establishes Kroetsch as Canada’s most important poet. While a collection necessarily leaves out the wonderful design features of the original individual publications (e.g. Seed Catalogue is no longer superimposed over the illustrated 19^th-century McKenzie catalogue), it’s fantastic to hold all these innovative, funny, wickedly sharp long poems in one hand.

Robert Kroetsch | Too Bad | U of Alberta P | 2010

A new collection of short-winded gems, at once tight and loose, dry and hearty. A master of timing. Kroetsch is 83 years old now, and will still charm anybody’s pants off.

Margaret Christakos | What Stirs | Coach House | 2008

Stunning, as always. The domestic is procedural and recombinatory.

Gregory Betts | The Others Raisd In Me | Pedlar | 2009

Betts composes 150 poems out of Shakespeare’s sonnet 150 through the “plunderverse” method: all letters (often words) come from the original, in the order they appear. The excess of it is entirely a pleasure, and every poem is imbued with the whimsy of that originating contortion. It’s a rangey book, announcing its survey of culture from the Renaissance to cyborgism. Delicious tension of maximalism and minimalism. Very appealing small fat book.

Darren Wershler-Henry | the tapeworm foundry | Anansi | 2000

Hilarious stream of compositional ideas. My favourite list.

Damien Rogers | Paper Radio | ECW | 2009

Much of the book is more traditionally lyric that most poetry on the third space lists, but I just really loved it. Intelligently aware of form, fresh, thoughtful, impressive.

Sina Queyras | Lemonhound | Coach House | 2006

Very exciting book – prose poem manna. Lisa Robertson, Gertrude Stein and Virginia Woolf are here by invitation, and the host holds her own.

Mark Truscott | Said Like Reeds or Things | Coach House | 2004

Best tiny poems.

Harryette Mullen | Sleeping With the Dictionary | California | 2002

Loved this book for years, but decided in 2009 to assign it to three levels of students (1^st year, 4^th year, grad students) to see what they would do with it. I had a chance to revel again in its charms, ingenuities and provocations, and the students figured out what poetry could do. We started most classes with 5 minutes of Mullen and that recast the whole year in the most wonderful way.

Rachel Zolf | Human Resources | Coach House | 2007

The perfect title for a book that mines, exploits and puts through the ringer the language of Zolf’s day job in corporate communications.

More Susan Holbrook here. Back to directory.

Attention Span 2009 – Meredith Quartermain

Thomas Bernhard | Frost | Vintage | 2008

Translated by Michael Hofmann, this novel, which involves a despairing artist in a gloomy Austrian town, contains some of the most poetic, painterly prose I’ve come across.

Aaron Peck | The Bewilderments of Bernhard Willis | Pedlar | 2008

Pure poetry, even though it’s called a novel.

Lisa Roberston | Lisa Robertson’s Magenta Soul Whip | Coach House | 2009

Who would not want to be whipped by such a magenta soul?

Margaret Christakos | What Stirs | Coach House | 2008

Christakos’s poetry is one of those best kept secrets I want to tell everyone.

George Stanley | Vancouver: A Poem | New Star | 2008

Stanley’s response to Paterson and Maximus—he never lets you forget how city thoughts are made.

Daphne Marlatt | The Given | McClelland & Stewart | 2008

This is the third novel/poem in Marlatt’s trilogy that began with the groundbreaking Ana Historic. It won the BC Book Award for poetry.

Louis Cabri | —that can’t | Nomados | 2009

Cabri is extremely inventive at recombining clichés, advertising slogans, corporate capitalist blague and popular sentiment so that they deconstruct each other with great humour and irony.

Michael Boughn | Dislocations in Crystal | Coach House | 2003

I read Boughn for, among other things, his syntax.

Michael Boughn | 22 Skidoo | BookThug | 2009

Boughn is to sentence as Miles Davis is to trumpet.

Peter Culley | The Age of Briggs and Stratton | New Star | 2008

One of the subtlest, drollest poets in Canada.

Myung Mi Kim | Commons | U of California | 2002

A very political book without being polemic, which explodes language away from its comfortable links to things and shows how violent it can be.

More Meredith Quartermain here.