May we have the envelopes, please

malahatreview_nov1214

 

CREATIVE BOOK AWARD WINNER:  Emily McGiffin’s Subduction Zone won the Association for the Study of Literature & Environment Environmental Creative Writing Book Award.

Judges said of her book:  “McGiffin’s poetry startles and provokes, even as it pleases and draws the reader in. Impressively, she takes on subject matter as immense as empire – its power over us yet vulnerability to self-destruction – and makes it vivid, personal, and immediate.”

Emily McGiffin is a PhD student in York University’s Faculty of Environmental Studies. Her PhD research investigates socioeconomic, cultural and environmental change in extraction-based communities of rural South Africa and Canada and the ways in which the literature of these regions engages with these concerns. In addition to Subduction Zone, she is the author of the poetry collection Between Dusk and Night (Brick Books, 2012) and has published widely in literary magazines across Canada.

Judges: Ross Gay (Indiana University), Joni Tevis (Furman University), and Scott Knickerbocker (The College of Idaho)

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ASLE Book and Paper Award Winners Announced

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Kate Cayley’s How You Were Born won the 2015 Trillium Book Award (Ontario).

http://www.thestar.com/entertainment/books/2015/06/17/kate-cayley-wins-2015-trillium-book-award.html

Cayley’s work was a finalist for the 2015 Governor General’s Award for Fiction and the Frank O’Connor Short Fiction Award (Cork, Ireland).

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Heartiest congratulations to both authors.


 

Subduction Zone

04 Cover.inddSubduction Zone

poems by Emily McGiffin

ISBN 1-897141-66-1, 9781897141663

$20

 Subduction Zone is a book of meditations on empire — the desires and agendas of empire, and empire’s detritus. From a sweeping panorama of imperial landscapes both classical and modern, it carries us into the troubled natural beauty of the Philippines. Its third and final sequence brings Canadians home, to the manifestations of global technocracy in northwest BC.  |   |  Whether contemplating rain forests in the Visayan Islands or Edward Burtynsky’s photographs, these poems gaze unflinchingly at the exploitation and upheaval that define several millennia of global politics. Their questions are both urgent and intricate. Who are we individually, collectively, in this era of looming ecological collapse? How do we acknowledge the blood on our hands yet bear witness to the beauty that remains? Pteropod is a collection of great integrity and ambition: trenchant, political, shot through with ravishing eroticism and tenderness. Emily McGiffin is poised to become one of the major voices in Canadian poetry.

During the five years that Emily McGiffin lived in northwest BC, she became proficient in the fine art of firewood splitting. She holds an MSc from the University of London and has worked and studied in Italy, Sierra Leone and the Philippines. Her poetry, essays, reviews and journalistic articles, widely published in magazines across Canada, have most recently appeared in Arc Poetry Magazine and Contemporary Verse 2. Between Dusk and Night, her first poetry collection, was a finalist for the Raymond Souster Award and the Canadian Authors’ Association Poetry Prize. She currently lives in Toronto where she is a PhD student at York University.

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NEWS:  Emily McGiffin’s Subduction Zone has been nominated for the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment’s Environmental Creative Writing Book Award. The mission of ASLE is to inspire and promote intellectual work in the environmental humanities and arts. Nominees of this year’s book award will be received at a June 2015 conference at the University of Idaho, in Moscow, Idaho. The judges for the book award were Ross Gay, Scott Knickerbocker and Joni Tevis. Here is an endorsement of Subduction Zone by one of the judges:

“McGiffin’s poetry startles and provokes, even as it pleases and draws me in. Impressively, she takes on subject matter as immense as empire— its power over us yet vulnerability to self-destruction— and makes it vivid, personal and immediate.”

Congratulations, Emily, from Pedlar Press.

 

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The Dangling Conversations

Click on any link below for some marvellous thinking by a Pedlar author.

 

The Conversation: Anne Fleming with Beth Follett | Open Book: Toronto.

The Conversation: Beth Follett with Jacob Wren | Open Book: Toronto.

Must-read interview: Martha Baillie & Ronna Bloom & Beth Follett, and TORONTO | Open Book: Toronto.

The Conversation: Beth Follett with Jane Munro | Open Book: Toronto.

The Conversation: Phil Hall with Beth Follett | Open Book: Toronto.

Finding a Perch: Beth Follett in Conversation with Jason Hrivnak | Open Book: Toronto.

Uproar, what a gorgeous word: Barry Dempster with Beth Follett | Open Book: Toronto.

Poets in Profile: Maureen Hynes | Open Book: Toronto.

The Conversation: Dani Couture with Beth Follett | Open Book: Toronto.