Guernica Editions – förlag

I have written Life Stories virtually in the space of one breath ?these stories have been imagined in such concentration, that I had to free myself from them. They came so naturally, that I am very happy to have returned to the short-story format. It seems to me that in these eight stories each individual and different life is so strikingly intense that it was not possible to place all into one novel ?Also in terms of style, I searched and found a different approach to each of the stories. I wanted to express myself more clearly and more simply. ?Nora Ikstena

James Deahl has been called "one of the ten or twenty finest poets writing in the English language." His poetry has been described as "precise articulations of landscape ..." producing "a highly charged evocation of place ... that it is as if the reader were the first person to stand there." This collection continues Deahl''s exploration of the natural world around him in language that is precise and startling, tinged with nostalgia but bravely facing the realities, and always with an eye on the larger picture.

In this stunning book, Wade Bell writes on the level of Raymond Carver and Roberto Bolano. He knows exactly what to leave out to make a short story great. This is a book everyone who loves great fiction and short stories will want to read. He is the master of endings and like Alice Munro keeps us guessing until the final sentence. These are stories to dwell on and ravish in. Read just one and you will be hooked! - Robert Hilles (Author of A Gradual Ruin and Partake).

In unflinching lyrics, Sue Chenette confronts her father''s depression and death. Probing memories, fingering mementos - a square nail, a sketch on a napkin, she examines them for what they may reveal of the father she was sure she knew, deepened, in death, into the mystery of his own being. The poems are a journey through grief, both a search for the father she loved and a searching look into a father/daughter relationship. At the heart of the book, the sequence ''A Transport of Grief'' explores a weave of pain, need, and blame, of family grudges and love, moments of solace, and the sweeping sense of loss that attends a parent''s death.

Most contemporary poets wear their cultural and artistic influences on their sleeve. Picking up a book in an English language bookstore, it is easy to see where the poet is coming from, either geographically, or culturally (ironic and formal; confessional and free etc). This may seem reductive until you read a book like the one you have in your hands. Put simply, Mia Lecomte is a quietly dazzling poet on her own terms. She is fed by multiple cultures, she is widely read, but her writing is unique and absolutely genuine. You won''t have read anything like this.

In French, Tombeau de Lou. At its origin, the death of the childhood friend, the chosen sister, swept away by a sudden cancer. She was fifty-three years old. Like the poet. The one who remains, the survivor, the inconsolable woman. That? the anecdote. Afterwards ?if an afterwards is possible, the urgency presses, the need to find words for the pain and questions that death raises, strewn at random in revolt, in violence, in memory, in mourning and in dread. To translate the hasty metamorphosis of the ever-so-living into the ever-so-dead. To give meaning, albeit fragile, albeit mortal, to the meaningless. To relate this little story of intimate suffering—all in all, banal—to the great history of international proportions. In this literary tomb of eleven songs, the need to attempt a utopian reconciliation: embrace all at once the immensity of the emptiness, the chaos, our fragile humanity, and our ardent desire for resistance.

The woman speaking in these poems is speaking of the body. Though she has a body with a head, she has a head that fails to understand her body. She is a woman whose head understands a language, but one not shared by the man she loves or wants to love. Theirs is a love-hate story between two foreign tongues that have nothing in common but the flesh. A tale of bodily couplings outside language, outside the world, and out of time; linguistically, a tale of madness. Sex has shattered her sentences. Hers is the story of a woman undone, who has willingly offered herself, abdicated utterly and been utterly defeated, as perhaps all women have dreamed of doing. It is a story as old as the world and yet brand-new. Though out of her depth, even out of her mind, she has been able to hold onto her language, to regain its use. Once the man is gone, the eternal now of his caresses at last enters the past. End, deafness, and let speech arise.

Songwriter Michel Laflamme is stuck in traffic on Montreal''s Jacques Cartier Bridge. While waiting for police to try to talk down a potential suicide, Michel turns on the radio and hears his wife, Bijou, founding member of Beaupré, the seminal Quebec folk-rock group. The music takes Michel across a 30-year span of memory, through the emotional and political upheavals of his own life and that of his Belle Province.

The poetic vision of A Taste of Earth, A Taste of Flame is timeless. It is also a work rooted in the thought of our own era. Though man does not escape his predicament, our own era has perhaps made him more aware than ever before of his destiny. But here the poet''s anguish cannot make him blind to the prodigious beauty of a world in which the gods of salvation and redemption are absent. This collection is a superb expression of the intensity of this awareness. And the ultimate happiness that lies in knowing, in awareness is what Daniel Sloate illuminates for us in his poetry.

This is a posthumous collection of poems. Though Axel Soestmeyer did not live to see the poems into print, this edition Chr(45) faithful to his intentions Chr(45) makes public the complex expression of an emotional thinker and intelligent lover. His mastery of vocabulary and the liberties he took with syntax and rhythm permit him to control a vital inspiration that could easily have slipped into vulgarity. Axel Soestmeyer assigns to the sexual and the spiritual similar roles, revealing not the facile moral solution of conformism but an understanding of the savage stuff which constitutes the human and his relationship to others and, ultimately, to God.

Daniel Sloate''s imagination has remained intact over the years. Be it in the form of the prose-poem or free verse, he rearranges the chaos in private experience by giving it an order which is entirely metaphorical. Every facet in our experience can be transformed into a myth-image and, as myth, Dead Shadows has the hypnotic fascination that ends only with the closing of the book.

The only reprint since its publication in 1924, this impassioned memoir of the often fruitless labors of an Italian immigrant in America describes the harsh, inhumane working conditions that immigrants had to endure at the beginning of the 20th century. Interested in more than material success in America, Pascal D''Angelo quit working as a laborer to become a poet. He began submitting his poetry to some of America''s most prestigious literary and cultural journals; he finally succeeded. But in his quest for acceptance, D''Angelo unwittingly exposed the complexities of assimilation. Like the writing of many other immigrant workers at the time, this autobiography is a critique of some of the era''s most important social themes.

An experiment in what the author terms “speculative history,” this novel tracks the movements of a man haunted by the spirit of his deceased mother and dogged by the notion that Astoria—the Italian neighborhood in Queens where his mother grew up in the 1920s—is the true capital of the world. In 1986, two years after his mother''s death, the narrator travels from Paris to New York to Rome, unable to escape the shadow of Napoleon, the historical figure he now associates with his mother. Weaving theory upon theory in an attempt to break the hold of these visions, he finds that she represents the fury, rage, and unappeased desire of migration and the displaced people left in its wake.

The writing of Carlos De Oliviera is usually considered neorealist, but this selection of poems also shows the influence of symbolism, surrealism, and cubism. These poems reflect on the nature of writing in the actual process of its production, which lends this work great density and acuity.

These poems test the capacity of individuals, families, communities, and the earth itself to stand the pressures of modern life. They walk the tightrope over the chasm between male and female, love and hate, child and adult, war and peace, and now and forever, attempting to find balance and reconcile the one with the many.

Haunting and memorable, the poems in this collection exhibit a sensuous command of language. They are written in the new formalism, a refreshing change from the spate of free verse that has lately dominated the poetry scene. In each poem, Whipple plays with assonance, rhythm, and intermittent rhyme to intensify his meaning.

This offbeat story collection effortlessly captures dark underworlds and the eccentric characters that inhabit them. In one story, a jealous tattoo artist revenges himself on the woman he loves. In another, one horrifying realization after another comes to light during a harmless childhood game. Told with a Hitchcock-like flair for psychological detail, these disturbing stories reverberate with gruesome plot twists and remarkable turns of fate.

Weaving together complex layers of personal and political history, this collection of poems traces a Jewish family''s path from 1930s Europe to 21st-century Canada. Recalling the delicate, enduring family bonds that have held fast through war and peacetime, these poems find lyric expression for the past century''s traumas, large and small.

Weaving homage and history, this collection of poetry was inspired by the life of Charlotte Saloman, the Berlin-born artist who perished at Auschwitz. Saloman was the author of Life? or Theatre?, an evocative fictionalized autobiography in paint that Saloman described as a means of conquering death. Bringing together biography and imagination, the conceptual lyrics in this collection evoke a terrible moment in history and celebrate a life that triumphed despite adversity.

In this slim volume, everyday objects become moments and forces, acting upon each other and changing the course of history. A lone cat, an abandoned piano, and a morning cappuccino are all more important than they initially appear. Moving through and influencing the world, these seemingly banal objects demonstrate and bend the laws of time, making an entire world spring to life.

The poems in this collection describe the survival of love and family during times of war. Spanning early-20th-century Russia to the present day, each war and upheaval is described as both a failure of peace and another step backward. The deeply antiwar poems attest to the survival of human love and the creative spirit during the most trying times.

The two short stories in this collection are steeped in the revelries and tragedies of nostalgia. A woman living in war-torn Prague contemplates revenge against her oppressors but instead chooses to “sleep with the enemy.” Both tales are set against a glimmering and dangerous Prague—populated by characters who are equally mysterious and beautiful.

This new take on Hindu mythology includes poems inspired by South Asian stories and covers the dealings of Vishnu, human avatars Rama and Krishna, and the relationship betweem Rama and his wife Sita.

In this novel from a Quebecois feminist writer, a shy sixteen-year-old falls in love with a classmate while attending a Catholic boarding school for prospective schoolteachers. When the fantasized relationship fails she takes superficial refuge with a group of girls recognizing her own loneliness and that of the group.

Themes of immigration and memory characterize this book of populist poetry. Gutsy and direct, the poet''s voice is also tender and humorous as her poems create small portraits of people in the midst of daily life.

This semi-autobiographical book reveals the childhood and teenage years of Bruno, a boy growing up in Toronto''s Little Italy area. With vivid descriptions of memorable events, this once-fledgling neighborhood comes to life with stories of weddings, funerals, feasts, and processions. Revisiting an endless array of family gatherings, neighborhood girls, dinners, and covert trips to Italy, these reminiscences about the city with the largest population of Italians outside of Italy creates a lively picture of multicultural friendships.

A realistic portrayal of the Sicilian fishing community in San Diego in the 1950s, Confetti for Gino captures the mood and atmosphere of a time that now seems antiquated and hard to believe. The novel centers around the DeMarino family, in particular fishing boat captain Gino DeMarino''s stubborn attempts to break away from tradition by vowing to marry a woman from outside the Italian community, and his mother''s (Mamma DeMarino''s) just as stubborn fight to ensure he marries someone within the community.

Ancient and medieval Jewish travelers are brought to poetic life amidst images garnered from the poet''s personal journeys crossing the Sahara Desert and voyaging down the Congo River. This title is number 135 of the Essential Poets Series.

One of the Maritime Province''s best poets offers his distinctive take on everyday objects, stripping them of familiarity and describing them anew, in this collection of poems from previous books. A strong sense of place—as well as the community that makes up a place—anchors the selections from this voice of Canadian realism.