CHEMICAL VALLEY, EYES OF THE RIGEL, THE AFFIRMATIONS, HAIL THE INVISIBLE WATCHMAN: Media Hits

IN THE NEWS!

CHEMICAL VALLEY

Chemical Valley cover

Chemical Valley by David Huebert (October 19, 2021), has been featured by CBC Books as part of ‘11 Canadian books to read for Earth Day 2022’! The list was posted online on April 22, 2022. Check out the full list here.

Chemical Valley was also reviewed by Peter Szuban in PRISM International! The review was posted online on April 21, 2022. Read the full review here.

Szuban writes,

“The characters in David Huebert’s new short story collection Chemical Valley live in a world that has been molded and shaped by neoliberalism and the oil industry—where the vulnerability of their bodies is constantly being subjected to a vague calculus that includes economic precarity, shifting personal relationships, and a natural environment lurching towards catastrophe. It’s a situation that could easily elicit nihilism, doom, and mourning—a kind of eco-grief—and yet, the various stories in this collection strive and yearn towards a sublime toxicity that finds beauty amidst the debris, and accordingly, in the lives of its inhabitants.”

Get your copy of Chemical Valley here!

EYES OF THE RIGEL

The third novel in Roy Jacobsen‘s The Barrøy Chronicles, Eyes of the Rigel (April 5, 2022), has been excerpted in Lit Hub! The excerpt was posted online on April 21, 2022. You can read the full excerpt here.

Get your copy of Eyes of the Rigel here!

THE AFFIRMATIONS

The Affirmations by Luke Hathaway (April 5, 2022) was excerpted in Lit Hub. The excerpt was published online on April 22, 2022.

You can view the poem, “As the Hart Panteth After the Water Brooks,” here.

Get your copy of The Affirmations here!

HAIL, THE INVISIBLE WATCHMAN

Hail, the Invisible Watchman by Alexandra Oliver (April 5, 2022), was reviewed in The Miramichi Reader. The review was published online on April 25, 2022. Check out the full review here.

Alison Manley writes:

Hail, the Invisible Watchman by Alexandra Oliver is a true triumph, with tight, well-constructed poems creating multiple worlds and stories. Oliver’s use of formal structure and metre is flawless, rich and enveloping. […] Oliver flits between contemporary settings to more distant ones, from the mundane every day to pop culture and all strange manners in between. […] The range of this collection is spectacular. The twists that Oliver places in her verses are sly and magical, the way she uses language and metre to craft such strong imagery in a handful of lines is truly masterful.”

Get your copy of Hail, the Invisible Watchman here!

POGUEMAHONE: Rave Reviews and Interviews!

IN THE NEWS!

POGUEMAHONE

Poguemahone by Patrick McCabe (May 3, 2022) was reviewed in The Irish Examiner on April 24, 2022. Check out the full review here.

Reviewer Josephine Fenton writes:

“This is a great enormous book by a great Irish author and should be welcomed by everyone in this great country and the world beyond. You might think, on first sight, that Poguemahone was following in the wake of Finnegan in its attempt to be enormously long, very dense and quite inaccessible. But it is not, at all. You can slip into it like a blunt knife through butter.”

Poguemahone was excerpted in RTE – Raidió Teilifís Éireann, published online on April 25, 2022. You can read the excerpt here.

Patrick McCabe was interviewed about Poguemahone in The Guardian. The interview was published online on April 24, 2022. You can read the complete article here.

Tim Adams writes:

“In the pantheon of storied Irish writers—Joyce in Dublin, Yeats on the west coast—McCabe has a special place as the conjuror of the small-town middle. […] The occasion for our lunch is McCabe’s new book, Poguemahone, an extraordinary 600-page free verse novel, already hailed in the Observer as “this century’s Ulysses” […] Once you get tuned to McCabe’s brilliant playful wavelength, after a couple or three pages, you find yourself at home in Aunty Nano’s famous late-night club […] and spending too much time at the ‘premier crash pad in all of north London’, paradiso or inferno, depending on your politics.”

Patrick McCabe was also interviewed in The Independent, published online on April 24, 2022. You can read the full interview here.

Emily Hourican writes:

“The book—a hefty 600 pages—is written in verse form. And, for those of you put off by the very idea, don’t be. It is by turns energetic, hilarious, tragic and terrifying, and easy to follow once you fall into the beat of it—’the beat of a bodhran, which is the beat of Irish history,’ says McCabe.”

 

Order your copy of Poguemahone here!

 

CHEMICAL VALLEY a finalist for the Atlantic Book Awards!

Chemical Valley coverChemical Valley by David Huebert (October 19, 2021), has been named a finalist for both the Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award and the Alistair MacLeod Prize for Short Fiction, presented by the Atlantic Book Awards! The shortlist was announced on April 22, 2022 at the Frye Festival. The Thomas Raddall Award is one of Canada’s largest literary awards and comes with a $30,000 prize and the Alistair MacLeod Prize comes with a $1,000 prize.

Winners will be announced at the Atlantic Book Awards Gala on Thursday, June 9, 2022 at Paul O’Regan Hall in Halifax Central Library.

You can see the full list of finalists here.

Get your copy of Chemical Valley here!

ABOUT CHEMICAL VALLEY

A Siskiyou Prize Semi-Finalist • Miramichi Reader Best Fiction Title of 2021

Out there by the dock the ocean and the air are just layers of shadow and darkness. But the creature’s flesh hums through the dark—a seep of violet in the weeping night.

From refinery operators to long term care nurses, dishwashers to preppers to hockey enforcers, Chemical Valley’s compassionate and carefully wrought stories cultivate rich emotional worlds in and through the dankness of our bio-chemical animacy. Full-hearted, laced throughout with bruised optimism and sincere appreciation of the profound beauty of our wilted, wheezing world, Chemical Valley doesn’t shy away from urgent modern questions—the distribution of toxicity, environmental racism, the place of technoculture in this ecological spasm—but grounds these anxieties in the vivid and often humorous intricacies of its characters’ lives. Swamp-wrought and heartfelt, these stories run wild with vital energy, tilt and teeter into crazed and delirious loves.

ABOUT DAVID HUEBERT

David Huebert – cr. Nicola Davison

David Huebert’s writing has won the CBC Short Story Prize, The Walrus Poetry Prize, and was a finalist for the 2020 Journey Prize. David’s fiction debut, Peninsula Sinking, won a Dartmouth Book Award, was shortlisted for the Alistair MacLeod Short Fiction Prize, and was runner-up for the Danuta Gleed Literary Award. David’s work has been published in magazines such as The WalrusMaisonneuveenRoute, and Canadian Notes & Queries, and anthologized in Best Canadian Stories and The Journey Prize Stories. David teaches literature and creative writing at The University of New Brunswick.

POGUEMAHONE: Reviews in the New York Times and more!

POGUEMAHONE

Poguemahone by Patrick McCabe (May 3, 2022) was reviewed by John Williams in the New York Times! The review was published online on April 20, 2022. You can read the full review here.

Williams writes:

Poguemahone is like a high dive: The toughest part of reading it might be convincing your feet to leave the board. Once you’ve done that, gravity does the rest.”

An excerpt of Poguemahone‘s New York Times review was included in LitHub‘s list of ‘5 Book Reviews You Need to Read This Week’! The list was posted on April 21, 2022 and can be read here.

Poguemahone‘s New York Times review was also featured in Library Journal‘s round-up posted on April 22, 2022. Check out the article here.

 

Poguemahone  was reviewed by Paul Perry in The Independent (Ireland). The review, ‘Patrick McCabe’s Novel Poguemahone is a Triumphant Bum-rush of Ribald Verse,’ was published online on April 11, 2022. Check out the full article here.

Perry writes:

Poguemahone is a shape-shifting epic of the Irish in England, steeped in music and folklore, crammed with characters, both real and imagined, on a scale McCabe has never attempted before. Indeed, among his 14 novels and two Booker Prize nominations, this stands out as risky, experimental work by an artist reluctant to rest on his laurels. Modernist and eager to push the boundaries of his own art and the art form of the novel, here is a novelist and novel to celebrate in all their ribald, audacious, outrageous, and compelling brilliance.”

 

Poguemahone was reviewed and featured as the “Book of the Day” in The Guardian. The review was published online April 22, 2022. You can read the full review here.

Ian Duhig writes:

“A major Irish writer of the postwar generation, Patrick McCabe is best known for his early novels The Butcher Boy (1992) and Breakfast on Pluto (1998), both shortlisted for the Booker prize […] His career since has shown a willingness to experiment in a wide range of forms and styles, climaxing in this verse novel, Poguemahone […] Though it won’t appeal to all fans of his earliest work, McCabe may be right when he claims that Poguemahone is his best book: it is startlingly original, moving, funny, frightening and beautiful.”

And it’s less than a month away from the North American launch of Poguemahone! Join author Patrick McCabe as he delves into his rollicking new book. This virtual launch will take place on Sunday, May 15 at 3PM ET. The event is organized by Books in Common NW and will be hosted by James Crossley.

Register for the event here!

Get your copy of Poguemahone from Biblioasis here!

 

MURDER ON THE INSIDE a finalist for The Crime Writers of Canada Awards of Excellence!

Catherine Fogarty’s Murder on the Inside: The True Story of the Deadly Riot at Kingston Penitentiary (April 13, 2021) has been named a finalist for The Brass Knuckles Award for Best Nonfiction Crime Book, presented by the Crime Writers of Canada! The award is sponsored by Simpson & Wellenreiter LLP, and comes with a $300 prize. Winners will be announced on May 26th, 2022.

You can see the full list of finalists here.

Get your copy of Murder on the Inside here!

Murder on the Inside coverABOUT MURDER ON THE INSIDE

Shortlisted for The Brass Knuckles Award for Best Nonfiction Crime Book

“You have taken our civil rights—we want our human rights.”

On April 14, 1971, a handful of prisoners attacked the guards at Kingston Penitentiary and seized control, making headlines around the world. For four intense days, the prisoners held the guards hostage while their leaders negotiated with a citizens’ committee of journalists and lawyers, drawing attention to the dehumanizing realities of their incarceration, including overcrowding, harsh punishment and extreme isolation. But when another group of convicts turned their pent-up rage towards some of the weakest prisoners, tensions inside the old stone walls erupted, with tragic consequences. As heavily armed soldiers prepared to regain control of the prison through a full military assault, the inmates were finally forced to surrender.

Murder on the Inside tells the harrowing story of a prison in crisis against the backdrop of a pivotal moment in the history of human rights. Occurring just months before the uprising at Attica Prison, the Kingston riot has remained largely undocumented, and few have known the details—yet the tense drama chronicled here is more relevant today than ever. A gripping account of the standoff and the efforts for justice and reform it inspired, Murder on the Inside is essential reading for our times.

ABOUT CATHERINE FOGARTY

Photo Credit: Margot Daley

Catherine Fogarty is a storyteller. She is the founder and president of Big Coat Media, with offices in Toronto, Los Angeles, Vancouver, and North Carolina. An accomplished television producer, writer and director, Catherine has produced award-winning lifestyle, reality and documentary series for both Canadian and American networks.

Catherine is the executive producer of the Gemini nominated series Love It or List It. In addition to that franchise, Catherine has produced several other lifestyle and documentary series including Animal Magnetism (W Network), My Parents’ House (HGTV), and Paranormal Home Inspectors (Investigative Discovery Canada). Catherine also produced and directed I Don’t Have Time for This, an intimate documentary about young women with breast cancer.

Originally trained as a social worker, Catherine studied deviance and criminology. She worked with numerous at-risk populations including street youth, people with AIDS, abused women, and social services.

Catherine holds an M.A. in Social Work, an MBA in Human Resource Management, and an MFA in Creative Non-Fiction from the University of Kings College. She was recently awarded the Marina Nemet Award in Creative Writing through the University of Toronto.

How a Poet Must: On the passing of Steven Heighton

It was with great shock and sadness that I learned of the passing last evening of Steven Heighton. We knew that he was ill, though we hadn’t for long. We were certain that he—and we—had more time. His partner Ginger Pharand called it “a forest fire of an illness,” and so it must have been. On February 17 he wrote to say that he’d “just been back from the hospital: barium smoothie and a 12 minute x-ray. It was surprisingly fun. It’s a merry crew in the imaging department.” You can hear Steve’s usual spirit, playful even in the midst of anxiety. When I inquired about his health he said that there was little to worry about, that the x-ray indicated that there was nothing life-menacing causing the pain he’d been living with. On antibiotics, he was looking forward to a month without weed or alcohol. We found out later that it was indeed life-menacing, but the prognosis still gave him a year, perhaps longer. If anyone was going to defy such a prognosis, wouldn’t it have been Steve? He was, if not quite youthful, then ageless.  

I didn’t get a lot of time in his presence. We ran into each other here and there over the years, at festivals, events, once at the Ottawa ceremony for the Governor General’s Award, the only time I ever saw him in a suit. When we launched his Reaching Mithymna: Among the Volunteers and Refugees on Lesvos we were in the middle of the pandemic, and the launch and even the Weston Writers’ Trust ceremony, after the book was nominated for the organization’s nonfiction prize, were virtual. It was a disappointment, not being able to get together with him to celebrate Reaching Mithymna, but we had other books, there would be other times. We’d met the first time a little more than 20 years ago, before Biblioasis existed as a press, when I invited him to Bookfest Windsor in support of his new novel, The Shadow Boxer. At the afterparty in his Al Purdy shirt—there’s a fine essay here on his relationship to that piece of clothing—black jeans and some sort of cowboy boots (though perhaps my memory is playing tricks), he looked to me like some kind of earnest punk, by which I mean to pay him the highest compliment: think of a slightly older Joe Strummer. He could certainly be mischievous—and we got up to some hijinx that night, playing a prank on a former schoolmate of his turned professor who had since Steve last knew him acquired a British accent—but it was a gentle brand of mischief, one that took a great deal of joy in the absurdity of the world, and of the literary world in particular. He was humble, self-deprecating, and obviously interested in everything, and in everyone, surrounding him. Care, concern, emanated. There are those writers, and we all know who they are, who work to keep the spotlight on themselves at all costs; others, far more rare, willing to divert that light elsewhere: Steven for me is one of only a handful of the latter.

If he was ageless, it was because of these qualities: he hadn’t hardened yet into any encrusted position. Being humble, he was still too curious about the world, willing to learn, try new things, consistently aware of what he didn’t know, hence he remained a touch more malleable than some of his other age-sharpened peers. He worked successfully across a range of forms, poetry, short stories, novels, and music, one feeding and bleeding into the next. He worked at translation throughout his career (he called these mistranslations) to be closer to the poets he most admired, and his versions of Paul Celan, Arthur Rimbaud, Osip Mandelstam and others (all gathered in House of Anansi’s Selected Poems 1983-2020, which you can purchase here) opened their work to me for the first time: full-bodied and felt, there’s no typical translator distance with these poems. Celebrated as a novelist, I think he truly excelled in the shorter forms: he was one of our best poets, a masterful short story writer, a playful essayist. His first two short story collections, Flight Paths of the Emperor and On Earth as It Is, rank as among the strongest collections published in the last quarter of the previous century in this country; and 2012’s The Dead Are More Visible is quite easily one of the best of this century. It received universal praise: “The best stories in this book,” Jeet Heer wrote in the National Post, “are as good as the fiction of Alice Munro or Mavis Gallant. Or, to be more blunt, Heighton is as good a writer as Canada has ever produced”; “As good,” Mark Medley agreed in the Globe & Mail, “a short story writer as anyone not named Munro … The best (living) author never to have won a Giller Prize.” He was working on the edits to his next collection, Instructions for the Drowning (forthcoming, Biblioasis) when the forest fire struck: it causes me immeasurable sadness that he won’t be present to launch the book with us.

It’s a strange thing to develop a relationship with writers through publishing their books. There are these intense periods of daily, more than daily contact, for weeks, months, sometimes as much as a year; before a bit more distance enters, you hear from one another less frequently, having less reason to do so, until the next book, and the cycle begins to quicken again. What we were most looking forward to with Steven was the next book, and not only because it promised to be spectacular: it was to work with him, to have reason once again to be in even closer contact, to share jokes and asides and encouragement. To finally spend a bit more time with him, in our backyard or his, coffee or wine or whiskey as the occasion warranted. But also because the next book promised to be spectacular, sparking the missionary element of our vocation: with Instructions for the Drowning we were going to work our asses off to try and finally bring him the readership he deserved. As we will, being the least we can do, and what Steve deserves. So: if you’re reading this, go read him instead.   

Steven Heighton made us better, as publishers, as people. I can see from the tributes that have met his passing we’re far from alone in this. He challenged and encouraged in equal measure, almost always getting the balance right. In this age of ironic detachment he risked being earnest, vulnerable, showing care and concern; “hardened against carious / words, spurious charms,” there was about him nothing counterfeit; he worked and worried about making the world a better place to be; worried about how he, and all of us, should move through it. And goddamn it is he going to be missed.  

–Dan Wells

 

(Photo credit: Neal McQueen Photography)

THE DAY-BREAKERS, THE AFFIRMATIONS, HAIL THE INVISIBLE WATCHMAN, EYES OF THE RIGEL, A FACTOTUM IN THE BOOK TRADE, POGUEMAHONE: Media Hits!

IN THE NEWS!

THE DAY-BREAKERS

The Day-Breakers by Michael Fraser (April 5, 2022) has been featured by CBC Books as part of ’27 Canadian books coming out in April we can’t wait to read.’ The list was published online on April 5, 2022. Take a look at the full list here.

Michael Fraser has been interviewed by Valentino Assenza on HOWL (CIUT) about his new collection, The Day-Breakers. The episode aired on April 5, 2022 at 10pm et. You can listen to/download the full HOWL interview here.

Michael Fraser was also interviewed by Pearl Pirie on Pearl Pirie about The Day-Breakers. The Pearl Pirie interview was published online on April 5, 2022. You can read his interview with Pearl Pirie here.

Get your copy of The Day-Breakers here!

THE AFFIRMATIONS

The Affirmations by Luke Hathaway (April 5, 2022), was reviewed by Holly M. Wendt in Ploughshares: ‘Conversation in The Affirmations.’ The review was published online on April 12, 2022. You can read the complete review here.

Wendt writes:

“The depth of references offers opportunities for entry and distance alike. Ranging freely across centuries of works, sacred and secular, Hathaway’s book, published last week, is as deftly conversant with John Donne as with Auden, as expert in its command of music, metrical and lexical as the maritime landscape. […] The object […] of The Affirmations, is not simply reifying what has come before, but challenging, re-imagining, and reclaiming what has been made into a tool of oppression.”

Order The Affirmations here!

HAIL, THE INVISIBLE WATCHMAN

Hail, the Invisible Watchman by Alexandra Oliver (April 5, 2022), has received a starred review from Annick MacAskill on Quill & Quire. The review was published online on April 1, 2022. Check out the full review here.

MacAskill writes:

“This last sequence, a series of English sonnets spoken in the voices of two of Wilson’s characters as well as a third-person narrator, is particularly well realized. Oliver proves herself a master at her chosen form; the sonnet and its demanding rhyme scheme serve as a springboard for the narrative moments and reflections she depicts. […]

Oliver displays a fidelity to rhyming verse not often found in contemporary Canadian poetry. The formal aspects of Oliver’s writing do not detract from, but rather enable her quick wit and clear-eyed assessments.”

Order Hail, the Invisible Watchman here!

EYES OF THE RIGEL

The third novel in Roy Jacobsen’s The Barrøy Chronicles, Eyes of the Rigel (April 5, 2022), has been reviewed in Publishers Weekly! The review was posted online on January 28. Though the review states that this is the last of the series, I’m pleased to let you know that Roy has surprised us with a fourth novel, and we will be continuing Ingrid’s journey in Spring 2023. You can read the full review here.

The reviewer writes:

“[An] expressive story of a woman’s search for her lover in post-WWII Norway. The translators inventively capture Ingrid’s dialect (“An’ thas knew this all th’taim”) as well as the power of the tense interactions between the characters. This delicate account of yearning perfectly caps the strong series.”

Order Eyes of the Rigel here!

Check out the first two books in the series, The Unseen and White Shadow, here!

A FACTOTUM IN THE BOOK TRADE

A Factotum in the Book Trade by Marius Kociejowski (April 26, 2022) has been reviewed by Danny Heitman in the Wall Street Journal as part of the article ‘5 Tales of Top-Shelf Book People.’ The article was published online on April 7, 2022. You can read the full article here.

Heitman writes:

“His polished sentences faintly resonate with Proustian echoes … Mr. Kociejowski … has a loose sense of narrative that perfectly simulates an afternoon ramble through a vintage bookshop. A dizzying diversity of books and authors strike against each other, creating sparks of insight. In the space of a few pages, he mentions Robert Louis Stevenson, Henry Green, Emily Dickinson, William Hazlitt, J.L. Carr and Patrick Leigh Fermor, offering concise assessments of each. Frequent footnotes, rendered as chatty asides, deepen his memoir’s digressive charm.”

A Factotum in the Book Trade by Marius Kociejowski (April 26, 2022) has also been reviewed in the Ottawa Review of Books by Timothy Niedermann! The review was published online on April 4, 2022. Have a look at the full review here.

Niedermann writes:

“Despite having a library with upwards of 1,000 volumes, Kociejowski does not feel he himself is a collector, however. He calls himself a “bibliophile”: a book lover. And this is the essence of A Factotum in the Book Trade. It is about love for books.

A Factotum in the Book Trade is an extraordinary work that will give all readers an increased appreciation for what books are and the many intricate roles that books play in our lives.”

A Factotum in the Book Trade was reviewed by Michael Turner in the British Columbia Review. The article, ‘Where the Magic Happens,’ was published online on April 8, 2022. You can read the full article here.

Turner writes:

“[I]n the book’s swirling opening chapter […], we find him reflecting on a working life (mostly in the antiquarian book trade) […] Mortality sets off this reflection (“What is forever when set against the universe? About the length of a sticking plaster”) (p. 1), then books (“‘The world is made,’ says Stéphane Mallarmé, ‘in order to result in a beautiful book.’ All else — the filling of an order, the cataloguing of a book — is mere procedure”) (p. 2) and bookselling (“The book trade is naturally secretive even when it pretends otherwise. What one might think is an open book is actually a closed one”) (p. 3).

It is this interplay between books (Kociejowski has authored books of poetry and travel writing) and bookselling (a staging ground into which enter books, employees and casual customers, but also literary archives, personal libraries, collectors and celebrated authors like Patti Smith, Robert Graves and Bruce Chatwin) where the magic happens.”

Order A Factotum in the Book Trade here!

POGUEMAHONE

Poguemahone (May 3, 2022) by Patrick McCabe has been reviewed by Sean O’Brien for The Telegraph. The review was published online on April 5, 2022. You can read the full review here.

O’Brien writes:

“McCabe, best known for The Butcher Boy and Breakfast on Pluto (both Booker shortlisted in the 1990s, and adapted into films), is not the first prose writer to seek the lingering prestige of poetry without having to write it. In fact it’s easy to ignore the verse, except as an effective scoring method: the reader hears the book as something spoken aloud, or whispered, or snarled, or insinuated or spat into his ear. The voice is an insistent companion who, having got hold of an elbow, has no plans to stop until his hour is exhausted or the auditor collapses under the weight of memory, bile, repetition and implication.”

Patrick McCabe was interviewed on BBC Front Row for Poguemahone. The interview aired on April 12, 2022. Poguemahone was also publicly announced as a May Indie Next pick by the American Booksellers Association on April 12, 2022.

You can listen to the full BBC episode here and view the May Indie Next list here.

Preorder Poguemahone here!

Spotlight On: LET THE EMPIRE DOWN by ALEXANDRA OLIVER

Spring is here and so is another title for our Biblioasis Spotlight series! To celebrate Poetry Month, we’ve decided to feature a quietly eerie collection of poetry from Alexandra Oliver, taking a trip across the ocean and slipping into homes, movies, and memories in Let the Empire Down (April 12, 2016).

And don’t miss a special note from Alexandra below, on her new collection Hail, the Invisible Watchman, which releases April 5!

 

LET THE EMPIRE DOWN

In her second book, Alexandra Oliver takes us on a journey of escape from the suburbs of Canada to Glasgow, Scotland. Training her eye on the locals—on the streets, by rivers, in museums, on playgrounds, in their own homes, in the ill-starred town of Lockerbie—Oliver travels back into her past while reflecting on issues of exile, memory and identity.

Excerpt from Let the Empire Down:

THE MEGABUS GOES BY SHERBERT LAKE

There’s the water tank that bears its name.
There’s its purple edge: the shore, the ship
that crossed the lake, beneath a heap of lime.
I went away. I gave the place the slip.

There’s the mall where I would watch and wander;
there’s the bench where I would go and cry;
there’s the Polish deli that went under;
I left it all. It won’t remember me.

There’s the strip of mansions on the lee;
there’s the strap that ravaged my behind.
There’s the corner which they saved for me;
I made it out, and nobody will mind.

There’s the pier where people disappeared;
there’s the field of seven hundred crows.
The wind blows now. Convenient, ill-starred,
there it goes, forever. There it goes.

Alexandra Oliver was born in Vancouver, BC. She is the author of Meeting the Tormentors in Safeway (Biblioasis 2013), winner of the 2014 Pat Lowther Memorial Award, Let the Empire Down (Biblioasis 2016), and the chapbook On the Oven Sits a Maiden (Frog Hollow Press 2018). She is the co-editor (with Annie Finch) of Measure for Measure: An Anthology of Poetic Meters (Penguin Random House/Everyman’s Library 2015). A PhD candidate in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University, she lives in Burlington, Ontario with her husband and son.

Pick up your copy of Let the Empire Down here!

A WORD FROM THE AUTHOR

On Her Latest Collection

Hail, the Invisible Watchman is my third book; I suppose, loosely speaking, you could say it forms a triptych with Meeting the Tormentors in Safeway and Let the Empire Down, in that it deals with the grimmer underside of the suburbs, those elements which puncture the myth of cultivated, middle-class perfection. The fictional town of Sherbet Lake keeps coming up in all three collections, so perhaps you could call the whole lump The Sherbet Lake Trilogy. Just a fanciful thought.

What informed me in writing this particular book (and I suppose what makes it different from its predecessors) was that I found myself thinking specifically about what it is to be haunted—in this case, by loneliness and fear and isolation and what that does to one’s state of mind. The pandemic upped the ante. When it hit, people were driven indoors. There was this initial pot-banging “We’re going to beat this!” performance of enthusiastic resistance that took hold at the beginning, but then it wore off. People become afraid of going out or else went into complete denial. The political divide became a gaping chasm, and public discourse turned vicious, illogical. When I speak of the “Invisible Watchman”, I initially thought of that which watches us—consumerism, social media, the alt-right, the spectre of totalitarianism—but now I think it really means that hidden side of the self that threatens to cannibalize you at every turn if you’re shut away and living with uncertainty. I think being judgmental is one of those toxic threads—that particular theme weaves through the whole book but particularly through the last two sections.

Having mentioned all of this heavy stuff, I wanted the poems in the book to have a cinematic/tableau-like quality to them and an element of humour. I sort of imagine my reader holding up a View Master (remember those?) to the light and clicking through the reel thinking Okay, well that’s weird, I wonder if it’s going to get any … no, I guess not.

Order Hail, the Invisible Watchman here!

Take a look at Alexandra’s other work here!

A FACTOTUM IN THE BOOK TRADE, POGUEMAHONE, SAY THIS, CHEMICAL VALLEY, DANTE’S INDIANA and ORIGINAL PRIN: Rave Reviews!

IN THE NEWS

A FACTOTUM IN THE BOOK TRADE

A Factotum in the Book Trade by Marius Kociejowski (April 26, 2022) has been reviewed in the April edition of the Midwest Book Review by James Cox. The review will be published online in the coming weeks.

Cox writes:

“An absolute ‘must’ for the personal reading lists of all authors, publishers, booksellers and dedicated bibliophiles, A Factotum in the Book Trade is an absorbing, entertaining, informational, and inherently fascinating combination of memoir and book trader insights and commentaries. One of those life stories that will linger on in the mind and memory of the reader long after the book itself has been finished and set back upon the shelf, this paperback edition of Marius Kociejowski’s A Factotum in the Book Trade should be on the Biography/Memoir shelf of every community, college, and university library.”

Preorder A Factotum in the Book Trade here!

POGUEMAHONE

Poguemahone (May 3, 2022) by Patrick McCabe has been reviewed by Anthony Cummings for The Daily Mail. The review was published online on April 1, 2022. You can read the full review here.

Cummings writes:

“No one who read McCabe’s 1992 novel The Butcher Boy could forget its chilling depiction of a troubled schoolboy in 1960s Ireland. His latest, a dizzying verse novel 600 pages long, is equally likely to haunt the mind. It has so many layers that we’re never sure where we are, but very roughly speaking, it centres on Una, an Irish woman recalling life in a London squat during the 1970s. The story of how she fell for a poet—and then caught him in flagrante—is intercut with the painful tale of her mother, Dots, a call girl in 1950s Soho. All this and more unfolds in a spectral tornado of voices, which calls into question the status of the narrator, Dan…”

Preorder Poguemahone here!

SAY THIS

Say This (March 1, 2022) by Elise Levine has been featured by 49th Shelf as part of their ‘Editors’ Picks for April 2022′ list. The list was published online on April 1, 2022.

You can check out the full list here.

Get your copy of Say This here!

CHEMICAL VALLEY

Chemical Valley cover

Chemical Valley by David Huebert (October 19, 2021), has been reviewed in bUneke Magazine! The review appears in their March issue, and was posted online on March 30, 2022. You can read the full review here.

The reviewer writes,

“Huebert works to create a world that seems almost futuristic then slowly reveals that he speaks of now and how our choices are destroying our health and our planet. He makes us feel the emotional side of well-developed characters as they face the world in fear and wonder.”

Grab your copy of Chemical Valley here!

ORIGINAL PRIN & DANTE’S INDIANA

The first two novels in Randy Boyagoda’s loose trilogy, Original Prin (September 25, 2018) and Dante’s Indiana (September 7, 2021), were featured in an article in the latest issue of Image Journal. The feature was posted online on March 31, 2022, and is in the print version of their latest issue. You can read the full article here.

Doug Sikkema writes:

“Boyagoda’s novel might be one of the best ways to ‘remember Dante forward’—to remember him in the present tense. By channeling Dante in a satirical vein, Boyagoda helps us see the impulses shaping the American and global economic order as spiritual forces—and the decisions made by individuals, communities, and even nations as products of disordered desire.”

Get your copy of Original Prin here!

Get your copy of Dante’s Indiana here!

 

THE SINGING FOREST, ON PROPERTY, THE AFFIRMATIONS, THE DAY-BREAKERS, HAIL THE INVISIBLE WATCHMAN, THINGS ARE AGAINST US, POGUEMAHONE: Media Hits!

IN THE NEWS

THE SINGING FOREST

The Singing Forest by Judith McCormack (September 21, 2021) was highlighted during a book segment on CBC’s The Next Chapter. Author Wendy McKnight was on the show to recommend three historical fiction novels, including The Singing Forest! The conversation aired on March 26, 2022, and was replayed on March 28, 2022. You can listen to or read the full conversation here, where the comments about The Singing Forest start at 6:45.

Wendy McKnight says:

“I think I may have saved the best for last. I just found this book so beautifully written, even despite the fact that it’s at times very horrifying and upsetting. [Judith McCormack] does a really masterful job of weaving a story from present-day Toronto and then going back to pre-World War II Belarus … And so that idea that people can go through times and can still maintain their dignity and their sense of self is such a strong theme that it’s just so beautifully done.”

Get your copy of The Singing Forest here!

ON PROPERTY

Rinaldo Walcott, author of On Property (February 2, 2021), is being featured by the Writers’ Trust Amplified Voices campaign, an effort to highlight books that were published by BIPOC or racialized Canadian authors during the COVID-19 pandemic. A video conversation between Rinaldo Walcott and Canisia Lubrin was released today, where they discuss On Property. You can watch the full video conversation here.

Learn more about the Writers’ Trust Amplified Voices campaign here.

“So the challenge for the persistence of human life is how will we redistribute everything that has come out of the dread and the horror but also the intimacies of these encounters.” —Rinaldo Walcott

Order On Property here!

THE AFFIRMATIONS

The Affirmations by Luke Hathaway (April 5, 2022), was reviewed by Jackie Wong in The Tyee: “On Affirmations and Letting Life Change Us.” The review was published on March 23, 2022. Check out the full review here.

Wong writes:

“There’s something healing about watching people wrestle with and arrive on the other side of a long winter of the land and spirit, whether onscreen or on the page. Accordingly, Luke Hathaway’s The Affirmations is just the thing to read now as we defrost from another pandemic winter and notice the green buds on tree branches, a promise of renewal almost in spite of all we’ve seen.”

Order The Affirmations here!

THE DAYBREAKERS & HAIL, THE INVISIBLE WATCHMAN

The Day-Breakers by Michael Fraser and Hail, the Invisible Watchman by Alexandra Oliver (April 5, 2022), have been reviewed on Marrow Reviews by Catherine Owen. The review was published online on March 24, 2022. Take a look at the full review here.

Owen writes:

“Two new poetry titles from Biblioasis, as distinct as can be envisioned, apart from their attentions to the specificities of sound, reassure this reviewer that a variety of approaches to the motivations behind poetry persists. Alexandra Oliver’s Hail, the Invisible Watchman points to the validity of artifice in craft beyond emotion’s call (an Eliotian acolyte perchance?), while Michael Fraser’s stunning collection The Day-Breakers attends to how feeling exists within diction, inside an era’s particular lexicon of pain and triumph.”

Order The Day-Breakers here!

Order Hail, the Invisible Watchman here!

THINGS ARE AGAINST US

Lucy Ellmann, author of Things Are Against Us (September 28, 2021), was interviewed by Nahlah Ayed on CBC Ideas. The episode aired on Thursday, March 24, and was posted online earlier that evening. Listen to the full interview here.

From the interview:

Nahlah Ayed: We hear it everywhere, group chats, social media, political commentary: people are overwhelmed with not just what’s happening in the world, but also by the amount of information that we get about what’s happening in the world. How do you cope with the ‘too-muchness’ of everything?

Lucy Ellmann: Well, one way is to read 18th-century novels. Nineteenth-century will do, too. They’re very involving. They’re beautiful. They’re funny. They’re full of satire. A kind of thing that no longer exists. Almost no one understands satire anymore. I think it’s because, I don’t know, education doesn’t exist, I guess, or we just all lost our sense of humour.

I think you have to get back to humour and nature. And I think, taking a walk and getting away from the machines. But if you go for a walk, everyone else is still on a machine out there. So they need their machines forcibly confiscated when they leave their house so that at least outdoors, there’s some kind of community life where you actually face each other.

Order Things Are Against Us here!

POGUEMAHONE

Poguemahone (May 3, 2022) by Patrick McCabe has been reviewed by Kirkus Reviews. The review will be published online on March 30, 2022.

The reviewer writes:

“A searing family drama and bittersweet evocation of nostalgia for lost youth.

Irish novelist McCabe’s new work is a leap beyond his previous accomplishments in fiction; a sprawling, epic novel in verse, the book builds on the tradition of lyric poetry as a method of storytelling, shot through with a postmodern Beat sensibility. The tale begins in the present as narrator Dan Fogarty arrives at the nursing home where his sister, the mercurial Una Fogarty, lives. From there, the narrative quickly moves back in time to the early 1970s to a communal house in London’s Kilburn district, where the siblings spent their early adulthood among an endless parade of flatmates, besotted poets, and various other hippies and hangers-on. At the center of this bohemian gyre is the Scottish poet Troy McClory, and the anything-but-rosy romance between Troy and Una becomes something of a leitmotif throughout the story. Swirling around this torrid relationship, the book details the siblings’ childhood during WWII and their coming-of-age against the backdrop of the Vietnam War, while the lingering specters of alcoholism, mental illness, and suicide are never far from the margins of the text. Despite these bleak themes, the novel is not without its share of humor—early ’70s pop-culture references abound, and the Joycean linguistic play is a pleasure to read. Structurally, the book is a marvel; McCabe’s inventive use of enjambment and stanza layout push the boundaries of what is possible in narrative storytelling. The vernacular, drunken verse format may be daunting at first, but after a few pages the narrative develops a hypnotic rhythm, as if one is sitting on a barstool listening to the narrator unspool his story over a pint (or three). At this point, the reader has merely to hang on and enjoy the ride.

A moving saga of youth, age, and memory—by turns achingly poetic, knowingly philosophical, and bitterly funny.”

Order your copy of Poguemahone here!

HOUSEHOLDERS

Householders cover

Kate Cayley, author of Householders (September 2021), was interviewed by James Tennant for Get Lit CFMU.

The episode aired on March 24, 2022 and is available online here.

Get your copy of Householders here!