cuRRents – serie

This long-awaited, landmark volume chronicles Alberta writing: the writers, their works, and their vigorous and changing landscape. A must for anyone interested in the cultural history of western Canada.

Here, in the second volume of a series, E.D. Blodgett extends the meditations of Apostrophes: woman at a piano, which won the Governor General's award for poetry in 1996. An astonishing hybrid of Symboliste vision and Elizabethan form, through you I is a lovely offering from one of Canada's leading writers.

Alberta's contradictory landscape has fired the imaginative energies of writers for centuries. The sweep of the plains, the thrust of the Rockies, and the long roll of the woodlands have left vivid impressions on all of Alberta's writers--both those who passed through Alberta in search of other horizons and those who made it their home. The Literary History of Alberta surveys writing in and about Alberta from prehistory to the middle of the twentieth century. It includes profiles of dozens of writers (from the earnestly intended to the truly gifted) and their texts (from the commercial to the arcane). It reminds us of long-forgotten names and faces, figures who quietly--or not so quietly--wrote the books that underpin Alberta's thriving literary culture today. Melnyk also discusses the institutions that have shaped Alberta's literary culture. The Literary History of Alberta is an essential text for any reader interested in the cultural history of western Canada, and a landmark achievement in Alberta's continuing literary history.

The troubles of 1885 are a topic of enduring fascination. Gabriel Dumont in Paris is a fictional retelling of the events leading up to the Northwest Rebellion, focussing on the thoughts and actions of Metis leader Gabriel Dumont. Jordan Zinovich reconstructs the man from a multiplicity of voices, leaving us to draw our own understanding of Riel's charismatic lieutenant.

In this, the companion to the landmark volume The Literary History of Alberta, Volume One: From Writing-on-Stone to World War Two, George Melnyk examines Alberta literature in the second half of the twentieth century. At last, Melnyk argues, Alberta writers have found their voice--and their accomplishments have been remarkable. The contradictory landscape, the stereotypes of the Indian, the Mountie, and the Cowboy, and the language of the Other, speaking from the margins--these elements all left their impressions on the consciousness of early Alberta. But writers in the last few decades have turned this inheritance to their advantage, to create compelling stories about this place and its people. Today, Melnyk discovers, Alberta writers can appreciate not only this achievement, but also its essential source: the symbolic communication of Writing-on-Stone. The Literary History of Alberta, Volume Two extends the study of Alberta's cultural history to the present day. It is a vital text for anyone interested in Alberta's vibrant literary culture.

Governor-General's award-winning poet E.D. Blodgett continues his series of meditations on love, living, and loss. This intelligent collection offers more of Blodgett's lush imagery and deep questioning within the apostrophe form. A lovely offering from one of Canada's leading writers.

Sonny, an aspiring musician, and Mad, a young woman down on her luck, struggle to survive in the mean streets of Montreal. Introduction by Nat Hardy.

A petty criminal eludes capture by becoming a hired man on a prairie farm, only to discover deception and betrayal. Introduction by Kristjana Gunnars.

In The Hydra's Tale, Robert Rawdon Wilson treats the experience of disgust not from the perspective of the disgusting object-in-the-world, but from its representation. Working through the spectrum of human response, culture, and art, Wilson teases out the assumptions that underpin the disgust response.

A Map of the Island is an extended poetic meditation upon a boy's youth in Trinidad. In these verses we hear the cadences of the West Indies spoken from the distance of the Canadian prairies.

The Hornbooks of Rita K, Robert Kroetsch's first volume of new poetry in more than a decade, is a brilliant collection of mysterious fragments. Where has Rita gone and who is reconstructing her oeuvre? Written with wit and playfulness, Hornbooks is a welcome new work from one of Canada's best writers.

You are about to read a book like no other. Bloody Jack is a collection about the making and unmaking of story, of poetry and of history. Based loosely on the life of John Krafchenko, a notorious Manitoban outlaw, the poems of Bloody Jack turn fact and fiction upside down and inside out. Dennis Cooley has added more than a dozen new poems to this revised edition and Douglas Barbour has written an introduction. By turns earthy and earnest, soulful and sly, Bloody Jack is a rollicking, fun-filled riot of a volume by one of Canada's favourite poets. "Bloody Jack is back again, bigger, bolder, sweeter and even more outrageous." -David ArnasonIntroduction by Douglas Barbour.

An Ark of Koans is a meditation on the mystery of what happens at the moment it happens. Although it takes animals as its threshold, animals only serve as innocent guides toward fathoming, if not understanding, events as small, inconceivable miracles.

E.D. Blodgett, winner of the Governor General's Award for Poetry, returns to Apostrophes with a music passing through his eyes. His latest collection, open the grass, brings glimpses into eternity, visions of a translucent muse trickling through fingers, and places of silence, and darkness, and epiphany. Blodgett's poetry has the ability to penetrate the mundane with a profound aesthetic sense. His spare, strong words kick up pleasure in the eye and unforeseen recognition. These sixty-six poems open the natural world to embrace human passage.

Hazard Lepage, the last of the studhorse men, sets out to breed his rare blue stallion, Poseidon. A lusty trickster and a wayward knight, Hazard's outrageous adventures are narrated by Demeter Proudfoot, his secret rival, who writes this story while sitting naked in an empty bathtub. In his quest to save his stallion’s bloodline from extinction, Hazard leaves a trail of anarchy and confusion. Everything he touches erupts into chaos, necessitating frequent convalescences in the arms of a few good women, except for those of Martha, his long-suffering intended. Told with the ribald zeal of a Prairie beer parlor tall tale and the mythic magnitude of a Greek odyssey, The Studhorse Man is Robert Kroetsch’s celebration of unbridled character set against the backdrop of rough-and-ready Alberta emerging after the Second World War. Introduction by Aritha van Herk.

Seven poets of diverse region, gender, sexual orientation, race, and generation. Seven poets linked by experiment and opposition. Robert Kroetsch discusses postmodernism's history, Fred Wah talks about ethnic hybridity, and Dionne Brand muses on postcolonial struggle and community. Erin Mouré encourages "excessiveness" while Daphne Marlatt speaks of "salvaging". On writing, poetics, and culture, Marie Annharte Baker and Jeff Derksen share their personal perspectives and experiences. Poets Talk brings new insights to the value of inspiration, imagination, and poetic re-invention.

A lament in light. A breath-taking memorial. Poetry and photography that compose the landscapes of remembrance. Once I saw your breath suspended in the air then I understood how fire could be white when I exhaled my breath followed yours into the sky that holds us both "Rich, profound, engaging, and written with an emotional depth rarely seen in much of contemporary poetry. There's a meditative virtuosity throughout this work, original and perceptive, alive with intelligence and compassion." Don Domanski

Margaret Laurence instinctively turned to the epic mode to create archetypal narratives of loss, exile, and redemption. Drawing on the Bible, Dante, and Milton, Laurence absorbed the epic structure and populated it with the Manawaka world of Hagar Shipley, Rachel Cameron, Stacey MacAindra, and Morag Gunn. Paul Comeau traces the development of Margaret Laurence's voice from its tentative beginnings in her African fiction to its culmination in the Manawaka Cycle. According to Comeau, Laurence's ability to illustrate the epic dimension in her characters' strengths and weaknesses has ensured her a lasting place among great Canadian writers.

"On our way home, we stopped in Vegreville for one last look at the Pysanka-and, posing in front of it while my dad pulled out his camera, I wanted to cry. Are we doomed? Click. Is this all we are? Click. How do we drag ourselves out from under the shadow of the giant egg? Click." Conceived in a fervent desire for fresher, sexier images of Ukrainian culture in Canada, and concluding with a new reading of enduring cultural stereotypes, Leaving Shadows is the first Canadian book-length monograph on English Ukrainian writing, with substantive analysis of the writing of Myrna Kostash, Andrew Suknaski, George Ryga, Janice Kulyk Keefer, Vera Lysenko, and Maara Haas.

"I am a writer because I was a reader first." Alison Gordon. "Nobody has ever written who never read." Mavis Gallant. "Reading is a connection, at once a way and a goal, a liberating destiny." Robert Kroetsch. Over 160 Canadian writers, in English and French, write about their experiences of reading. With striking photographs of each writer, Reading Writers Reading offers a sublime voyage into the heart of literary creation. Foreword by Russell Morton Brown.

"The strength of this book is in its quick-change artistry, the sensation of flux that is continuous, and capable at any moment of erupting into epiphany or surprise." Roo Borson Across great distances and a panorama shaped by words, poets Douglas Barbour and Sheila Murphy began writing in collaboration. Tapped to technology's dance across paper, with thoughts like bright colours coursing across screens, Continuations emerged as the product of a new creator, a "third individual," who writes differently from either poet. Words shapeshifted and poets transformed, Continuations is an intriguing addition to the growing field of collaborative poetry in North American literature.

In ancient Roman times rituals were performed to sanctify the ground on which new cities were founded. With this invocation, space could then be occupied. In her brilliant new collection, Alice Major's poems concern themselves with human occupation: how we occupy cities; how we occupy ourselves as citizens, workers and thinkers; how we occupy mythologies and metaphors; and how we occupy the passage of our lives. Written largely in a public voice, these poems invoke human preoccupations that resonate through landscapes of time and space.

Cast during his year in the U of A's writer in residency, wild horses is Ottawan rob mclennan's deep lyrical engagement with Edmonton, Alberta. He sees the new terrain through his peculiar, sympathising lens--characterised by impassioned tones that range from brusque to tender. There is something of the magpie in him: nothing escapes his subtle gaze, his flighty wit, his voracious gleaning of experience. His supple lines meander and flit over scapes of love, home, family, and literature, rewarding the magpie-minded with a lucid estrangement to things both unfamiliar and familiar.

A prodigious body of innovative writing behind him, Robert Kroetsch turns to a starker lyrical mode in Too Bad: Sketches Toward a Self-Portrait. Oscillating between the many moods of a human heart that has lived through so much-from whimsy and scorn through desire, longing, lust, love, and serenity-these sketches mark a candid walk through the tortuous corridors of the poet's remembering, and exemplify the rehearsed dictum of an old teacher: "Every enduring poem was written today." Simply put, "This book is not an autobiography. It is a gesture toward a self-portrait, which I take to be quite a different kettle of fish." -- Robert Kroetsch, from the Introduction

This is a daughter's poetic homage to her parents, both elegy and celebration, that explores the transformations wrought by history, biology, and the alchemy of love. In Greek myth, the daughters of Memory were the Muses. Alice Major listens carefully to their voices. ".tender, wise, beautifully cadenced work which embraces the reader on every page." - Don Domanski

For more than fifty years, Canadian literary legend Rudy Wiebe has been defining and refining prairie literature through his oeuvre of world-renowned novels, histories, essays, and short stories. He has introduced generations of readers far and wide to western Canadian Mennonite, aboriginal, and settler culture. Some say he wrote the book on historical prairie fiction. In fact, he's written quite a few. The University of Alberta Press is proud to publish the fifty short stories that Wiebe completed between 1955 and 2010, including four previously unpublished stories. This is a must-have book for aficionados of great world literature, fans of prairie fiction, and Wiebe's faithful readers. Introduction by Thomas Wharton.