SHORTS by MIDI ONODERA

http://midionodera.com/2012/on-holiday/

http://midionodera.com/2012/grief-without-fantasy/

http://midionodera.com/2012/use-these-poems-2012/

COVER IMAGE Winter Twister (2006), by Will Gill, photo by John Haney

THE BOOK

Written collaboratively, the poems of Whisk play with language in all kinds of weather as they nod to traditions of Japanese linked poetry. From the everyday to the intensely lyric, moving through urban and rural landscapes, the images and surprising leaps — potatoes in a cardboard box, starlight, cows in monsoon-soaked trees — move readers as readily to laughter as into contemplation.

Traditionally, renku or linked verse was composed under the guidance of an esteemed poet like Basho, during an evening of festivity with plenty of food and drink; longer sessions might include outings to natural or sacred places. Verses are linked by objects, word play, moods, and other means that are neither merely logical nor predictable, and the emerging poem is more journey than story. In Whisk, a burlap-wrapped shrub leads to a cat with a dead mouse at a dinner party, which leads to a man smoking alone in a car. The Doggies happily uphold the festive tradition of the renku party, but are completely collaborative, editing and revising together.

In Yoko’s Dogs’ practice, traditional Japanese images take on a distinctly Canadian and contemporary cast. The poets write of snow, ice and slush; wolf or buffalo moons; highways and logging trucks; bear scat and batteries; bus queues and dog runs; skunks in the garden and squirrels running off with baguettes from the trash. Whisk evolved over five years. Though rooted in Canada and the northeastern US, it spans several continents, touching down lightly in Brazil, India, Greece and Italy, even as it returns to the constancies of home and our place in the world.

THE AUTHORS

Yoko’s Dogs was formed in 2006 around a small tin table at La Maison Verte, a co-op grocery and café in Montreal, when poets Susan Gillis, Mary di Michele, Jan Conn and Jane Munro decided to engage in writing Japanese-style linked verse as a way of expanding their individual practice and exploring new forms. Over the first few months, they wrote and revised and wrote some more, read and studied and discussed the traditions, all via email. They quickly settled on a system of composition, and decided that for readers the mechanics of this system should disappear, as the forms for molded concrete are knocked away after the concrete object is set. The result is this book’s standard four-verse poem, occasionally expanded into longer sequences.

In 2008, all four poets met for a three-day renku party in rural Ontario. Here the Doggies composed their first site-specific sequence and substantially revised earlier work. At this meeting too they found their name, in one of their earliest and most haunting images, “Yoko’s house is dark, her dogs/tied in front too cold to bark.” Since then they have continued to work from distant places, meeting once a year to compose and revise.

Meanwhile, each of the Doggies remains actively engaged in her own work. Susan Gillis teaches literature and creative writing in Montreal; her most recent books are The Rapids (Brick, 2012) and Twenty Views of the Lachine Rapids (Gaspereau Press, 2012). 
Mary di Michele, poet and novelist, teaches at Concordia University. Her latest poetry collection is The Flower of Youth, Pier Paolo Pasolini Poems. 
Jan Conn is a research scientist in Albany, New York, and her latest book of poems is Edge Effects (Brick Books, 2012). Jane Munro lives in Vancouver; her most recent poetry book is Active Pass (Pedlar Press, 2010).

In keeping with tradition, which they happily and radically break in order to invent anew, the Doggies’ practice is rigorous, exacting, challenging and exuberant. Wherever they are, when they are writing together, laughter rises and poems occur.

ISBN 978.1.897141.54.0 | $20

Pat Lowther Memorial Award Shortlist
The League of Canadian Poets’ Pat Lowther Memorial Award is given for a book of poetry by a Canadian woman published in the preceding year, in memory of the late Pat Lowther, whose career was cut short by her untimely death in 1975. The award carries a $1,000 prize.

Congratulations to Maureen Scott Harris, Pedlar finalist.

Soul Mouth by Marilyn Bowering (Exile Editions)
Monkey Ranch by Julie Bruck (Brick Books)
The Book of Marvels by Lorna Crozier (Greystone Books)
Slow Curve Out by Maureen Scott Harris (Pedlar Press)
A Grain of Rice by Evelyn Lau (Oolichan Books)
Song and Spectacle by Rachel Rose (Harbour Publishing)
2013 Jury: Kate Braid, Gay Allison, Marsha Barber

*Cottonopolis* is a sequence of prose and found poems about the Industrial Revolution, in particular the links between the cotton industry in Lancashire, slavery in the Americas and the colonization of India. From the Irish slums of Manchester to the forts of the Slave Coast to the ruins of Dhaka, India; from Civil War battlefields to Lancashire factory floors, from slave ship sailors to machine-breakers to child labourers, these poems tell the stories of the industrial age.

Rachel Lebowitz is the author of *Hannus* (Pedlar Press, 2006) which was shortlisted for the 2007 Roderick Haig-Brown Regional BC Book Prize and the Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction. She is also the co-author, with Zachariah Wells, of the children’s picture book *Anything But Hank!* (Biblioasis, 2008, illustrated by Eric Orchard). She lives in Halifax.

Here’s Rachel reading from *Cottonopolis*

http://www.authorsaloud.com/poetry/lebowitz.html

ISBN 978.1.897141.53.3 | $20

FINALIST for the BC BOOKS ETHEL WILSON FICTION PRIZE. WINNER announced in May 2013.

http://arts.nationalpost.com/2012/08/24/book-review-gay-dwarves-of-america-by-anne-fleming/