Dektet 2010

Dektet 2010 A Celebration of Canadian Poetry

The year 2010 marks the 10th

anniversary of Frontenac House and the Quartet poetry series.

To celebrate, Frontenac will simultaneously publish 10 poetry books in April– Dektet 2010.

Titles were chosen by a jury of leading Canadian poets: bill bissett, George Elliot Clarke,

and Alice Major using a blind selection process. Jury members did not know the identity of

persons submitting manuscripts.

Frontenac House is a dynamic Calgary-based literary press that publishes bold new work.

Primarily a poetry house, Frontenac is now also publishing other literary genres including

Western Canadian history, political satire and fine art books.

Frontenac House was launched in 2000 and has published 62 books, 52 of them poetry titles.

Frontenac House has published poetry which has won or been shortlisted for nearly every

major poetry prize in the country.

“Calgary’s Frontenac House has made an impressive impact as one of Canada’s publishers

to watch. They’ve done it with a smart selection of good writing and energetic promotion.

Their increasingly effective book design hasn’t hurt either.” – Harry Vandervlist, Fast

Forward Weekly

Dektet 2010 launches

EDMONTON

April 27, 7 pm

Stanley A. Milner Library Theatre

#7 Sir Winston Churchill Square

An extension of the Edmonton Poetry

Festival

All 10 Dektet poets will be at the event.

CALGARY

April 29, 7 pm

John Dutton Theatre

Macleod Trail

The closing event of the Calgary

International Spoken Word Festival

All 10 Dektet poets will be at the event.

TORONTO

September, date tba

All 10 Dektet poets will be at the event.

In May, the Dektet poets will be at

events in their home communities across

Canada

Dektet 2010

Attenuations of Force

Children of Ararat

Confessions of an Empty Purse

Ex Nihilo

Fallacies of Motion

Falling Blues

Learning to Count

[sic]

Standoff Terrain

White Shirt

A big thank you to SheriDektet 2010 in their wonderful array of events. Thanks also to Alice Major and the Edmonton Poetry festival for allowing Dektet 2010 to be an honorary extens

Frontenac House is grateful to the Alberta Creative Development Initiative for their support in

publicising and marketing Dektet 2010. We gratefully ackn

for the Arts and of the Alberta Foundation for the Arts for our publishing program.

Attenuations of Force Lori Cayer Winnipeg, MB

Children of Ararat Keith Garebian Mississauga, ON

Confessions of an Empty Purse S. McDonald Toronto, ON

Ex Nihilo Adebe D. A. Toronto, ON

Fallacies of Motion William Nichols Edmonton, AB

Falling Blues Jannie Edwards Edmonton, AB

Learning to Count Douglas Burnet Smith Antigonish, NS

] Nikki Reimer Vancouver, BC

Standoff Terrain Jocko Benoit Calgary, AB

White Shirt Laurie MacFayden Edmonton, AB

A big thank you to Sheri-D Wilson and the Calgary International Spoken Word Festival for including Dektet 2010 in their wonderful array of events. Thanks also to Alice Major and the Edmonton Poetry festival for allowing Dektet 2010 to be an honorary extension of the festival presentations.

Frontenac House is grateful to the Alberta Creative Development Initiative for their support in

publicising and marketing Dektet 2010. We gratefully acknowledge the support of Canada Council

for the Arts and of the Alberta Foundation for the Arts for our publishing program.

Winnipeg, MB

Mississauga, ON

Toronto, ON

Toronto, ON

Edmonton, AB

Edmonton, AB

Antigonish, NS

Vancouver, BC

Calgary, AB

Edmonton, AB

D Wilson and the Calgary International Spoken Word Festival for including Dektet 2010 in their wonderful array of events. Thanks also to Alice Major and the Edmonton Poetry

ion of the festival presentations.

Frontenac House is grateful to the Alberta Creative Development Initiative for their support in

owledge the support of Canada Council

for the Arts and of the Alberta Foundation for the Arts for our publishing program.

Attenuations of Force “tremor and aftershock … an unzipping of language” This collection is framed by two powerful elegies – one, unexpectedly, for a dead pigeon and

the other for a deeply loved human being. The work is informed throughout by an

understanding of science and biology, the physical grounding of life transformed into poem.

These lyrics are not just poems; they are exemplary. Language is lifted up, then returned to us

as harmonized image and music. —Jury, Dektet 2010

Lori Cayer’s poetry soars and dives among tempests of desire, death, love and loss, pulling

readers/listeners into the vortex of the storm and leaving us breathless in its aftermath. Her

poems are merciless in their hunt for prey, from domestic minutia to the fluid flow of

maelstroms. A father’s knife “so thin it hums in the hand.” A tornado pulling a ponytail into

“whirligig, exclamation point, drill bit, blender. Attenuations of Force is tremor and aftershock,

a howl into the wind, an unzipping of language. —Mari-Lou Rowley

Attenuations of Force is a collection that commands our attention. Unnerving and charming in

turns and at all points, linguistically supple, Cayer’s fierce, unflinching poems of selves made

and unmade, of postmodern lusts and blind faith, will torque your brain around. Whether Cayer

is mapping a weather that "drums your body apart" or riffing off a neo-gothic Jeff Goldblum

morphing into a fly, her poetic altered states and stated alterations will dazzle you. No

question, Cayer means business." —Jeanette Lynes

By Lori Cayer

978-1-897181-31-7

$15.95

Mechanistic Insights from Wall Compositions I enclose a memory of trees and clear moon,

provoked by wind.

The film of it played out on my blue cinderblock wall.

Up past bedtime I pointed here and there with a ruler,

shadow pine shapes stabbing, sounds from outside,

outerwear flung, an ashtray thrown,

top of an arm grabbed too hard. I pretended I was a teacher,

the skirling language of dendrites, the lesson.

Now, it’s important to know the names of trees, purchased

with house, Subgenus Strobus: white or soft pines,

the number of years it’s taken them to obstruct my point

of view so completely, and in this way I may be more,

or less, inclined to kill them. The white space shows

my adaptive potential has improved only slightly from nil.

I had written: wind is the interaction of sleep with memory

and other body rhythms. Attenuations of force.

When it’s bad I wear earplugs to bed. But still.

The whistling.

The rapping. The breaking through. Waking

to disorderly bulletins hindered at the door.

I used to blame the trees, but I know more about biology now.

About the meeting of lamentable forces, the force of lamentable

meetings. The decisions we take, bent swiftly,

out of the air.

LO R I CA Y E R ’ S first book Stealing

Mercury (The Muses’ Company) won

the Eileen McTavish Sykes Award and

was a finalist for the McNally Robinson

Book of the Year Award. She is a past

winner of the John Hirsch Award for

Most Promising Manitoba Writer. Lori

is the co-founder of the Aqua Books

Lansdowne Prize for Poetry/prix

Lansdowne de poésie.

Children of Ararat “passionate, relentless and incandescent” Children of Ararat addresses the legacy of the Armenian genocide. A son shaped by his

father’s experience serves as witness to the aftershocks of brutality. This poet is unafraid to

face the horror that is too often the result of politics and too much the truth of history. —Jury,

Dektet 2010

If you want to feel how deeply a genocidal history can impact the imagination, read these

brave, passionate, relentless and incandescent poems by Keith Garebian. —Peter Balakian

Rage, for it to work on the page, requires a control so stern it seems like ease of phrase;

historical pain made personal cannot be made convincing without such control and craft as is

found in these poems by Keith Garebian. —Barry Callaghan

In Children of Ararat, Keith Garebian, relentlessly and with an optic heart, pursues the

suffering of the victims, exposes historical hypocrisies, and pleads with the world to

acknowledge the truth about that dark chapter in the lives of his people. The Armenian

genocide has certainly stung Garebian into poetry. These poems are a splendid memorial which

will continue to haunt the reader long after he has put them aside. —Henry Beissel

If we put our ears to the ground, we will hear “death by wholesale subtraction,” we will hear

the story of shoes lost and the sounds of shoes boiling. We will hear the powerful passionate

voice of Keith Garebian who will not be silenced and whose tongue “licks the caves where the

dead lie in hibernation.” —Joy Kogawa

By Keith Garebian

978-1-897181-32-4

$15.95

This Tongue Tries The stars stay awake all night,

turning, turning in their bruised light.

Mothers speak to me in dreams,

telling of swarms of mayhem.

Galaxies of women float in a sea of dreams—

half are really nightmares.

No relief from the body or reconstruction of the mind.

More than a century of long silence.

Imagine this silence as the burning of books,

a library sending signals of smoke.

Yet a few words in an age of combustion

are traced by my hand against the swagger of flame.

This tongue tries a reparation of speech

beyond the reliquary ashes of books.

It licks the caves where the dead

lie in their long hibernation.

How offensive my words seem, powerless

against the eye’s obscenities.

And how this concrete, unforgiving world, now and then,

writhes, gripped in the thick jaws of monsters

K E I T H GA R E B I A N is a widely

published, award-winning

freelance literary and theatre critic,

biographer, and poet. Among his

many awards are the Canadian

Authors Association (Niagara

Branch) Poetry Award (2009), the

Mississauga Arts Award (2000 and

2008), a Dan Sullivan Memorial

Poetry Award (2006), and the

Lakeshore Arts & Scarborough

Arts Council Award for Poetry

(2003). This is his fourth book of

poetry.

Confessions of an Empty Purse “the interstices of gender, perception and image” confessions of an empty purse is a poetic transmemoir of passion and fear, laughter, nightmares

and dysphoria, preservation, degradation, dreams and pride … and it really happened. I was –

am – there. —S. McDonald In these street-wandering confessions, McDonald explores the interstices of gender,

perception, and image, floating freely between the depths of narrative and the butterfly brevity

of poetry. Here is a text where bodies are mapped onto memories, in turn mapped back onto

bodies, a palimpsestic circulation that sometimes storytells, sometimes startles, and always

spills its truth, a purse overturned on a page.—Ashok Mathur

A book of poetry that reads compulsively like a novel – the anguished and ultimately

courageous story of an individual caught between genders. The narrator is caught in the

funhouse mirror of movies and pop culture, between dreams and self-loathing. These poems

must be read in tandem with 1960s/70s sexual liberation classics: Jacqueline Susann’s Valley

of the Dolls (1966), a novel never-old; and Rosemary Daniell’s Sexual Tour of the Deep South

(1974), a set of “happening” poems.—Jury, Dektet 2010

By S. McDonald

978-1-897181-33-1

$15.95

Yeah, so, I have the soul and temperament of Miss Joan Crawford

inside me; deep inside me all ankle strapped pumped and red

slashed lips and major coke bottle thick eyebrows saying: ah, shut up!

Me, a moviestar and MGM and the whole world loves me!

I have the body and face of Mr. Broderick Crawford outside me

and all the King’s Men with all the scalpels and silicone in the world

can never, ever change that and fuck off; no they can’t. I lumber down

Church Street and try not to trip on the hem of my invisible black

velvet gown and tell myself again and again stop all this bullshit

right now; do what I’m telling ya!

I know what it’s like to

really want to die and to

drink, take all the pills

and slash your wrists over

and over and in the midst

you have this sudden flash

that you’re really doing it

and you’re really going to

die this time and then something

happens

and that something is

that either you die

or

you don’t.

i didn’t.

this time.

S. M C D O N A L D was born, raised and

continues to live in Toronto. Ze grew up in

pre-gentrification Cabbagetown and

Regent Park. Ze has performed zir

alternative spoken word performance

pieces at various venues including Buddies

in Bad Times Theatre’s annual Rhubarb!

Festival. Ze is the love child of Christine

Jorgensen & John Rechy & the spiritual

godchild of Jacqueline Susann.

From Confessions of an Empty Purse

By Adebe D. A.

1-897181-34-8

$15.95

ex nihilo “bold, beautiful, and timely” These lyrics dare to “bring da noise” – not only the funk and blues of race snafus, but also the

exquisite soul sound of intellectual analysis, harmonizing rhythmic lines and gritty insights.

They come from a woman who knows the intricate gradations connecting black skin to white,

pop culture to academia, and links sophisticated analysis with the verve and drive of

performance poetry. —Dektet Jury

Ex Nihilo troubles the waters of identity, opens the borders of literary precedence and official

“canon” and is straight from the hip. It is fierce, streetwise poetry, with “a beauty of

incongruence.” —Anne Waldman

The poems delight in the play of line against idea in a vexed terrain of politics and feeling;

history and the contemporary search here for new images. A poet of great promise. —Leslie

Sanders

At once bristling and lyrical, intimate and political, Adebe’s persona in this courageous debut

collection of poems vacillates between seemingly irreconcilable poses: artist and academic,

activist and sensualist, innovator and traditionalist. As she confesses in the poem “Colour

Lessons”, she’d like to be everything. Herein the reader will discover the richness of mixed

legacies, competing voices, and the joys and burdens that come with them. — Priscila Uppal

Ex Nihilo is a bold, beautiful, and timely collection of poetry. Deeply imbued with a rhythm as

deep as Langston’s rivers, Adebe D.A. choreographs her words to dance on and off the page—

her canvas. A remarkable remix of language and history, Ex Nihilo moves us to places we have

not yet considered. A call to both thought and action, Adebe confronts and celebrates her

polychromatism. She is a major voice of a new generation. —M.K. Asante, Jr.

English Literature Why,

Because chiaroscuro

is where I belong.

That and I was once Pushkin’s wife.

O, my darling octoroon

your Russia is doing alive and well,

but your Ethiopia is still squinting into the sun,

blind and full of light

trying to find empire in uptown Harlem

but all we get is

gentrification petrification talk

about holy war, race war, war on war

while the Church of Nazareth on 144th stands

a burned-out shell, waiting.

From Ragtime Bourgeoisie I am voluntarily black

you like my jive? my joy, kicks, darkness,

night? Then follow me down

to the place where it hurts,

where politics get dirty

and primitive

in between jazz riffs

where you will hear the question

of how cool should you really get

AD E B E D. A. is a writer whose

words travel between Toronto and

New York City. She recently

completed her MA at York

University, where she also served as

Assistant Editor for the arts and

literary journal, Existere. Her work

has been published in various North

American sources, such as Canadian

Woman Studies Journal, The

Claremont Review, Canadian

Literature, CV2 and The Toronto Star.

She won the Toronto Poetry

Competition in 2005 to become

Toronto’s first Junior Poet Laureate.

Ex Nihilo is her debut collection.

Fallacies of Motion “delightfully arch and delicately stern”

These poems were taken from a diary of poems and sketches kept over forty years. In

retrospect they have a repeating pattern of awareness and lack of awareness, of uncomfortably

being in society and more comfortably slipping back to be in nature. When analysis fails, as it

always does, the poet slips back again inside his skin. It is a journey to no place except home. William Nichols has created a series of poems here that challenge readers to re-examine their

views of the most fundamental of relationships – those between us and all living things.

Whether they are in our human existence or in the natural world surrounding us, the reader

will soon recognize the broad convergence employed to appreciate the transitory nature of all

living things. Human pack rats, stray dogs and damaged, doomed shorebirds find their way

into our consciousnesses. Nichols’ poems are neither obsequious nor sentimental. His long-

practiced objectivity finds its way through the inner worlds of reactionaries, bureaucrats and

magpies, as he shares this storehouse of observations. There is a long vision to this work. —

Dean Morrison McKenzie

Here is contemporary wisdom in verse. Imagine ancient Solomon revived and even more

cynical, witty, precise, and scathing. These lyrics are delightfully arch and delicately stern.

They range from wry takes on technology and white-collar conundrums to introspective riffs

on grief, loss and the compensations of travel. —Jury, Dektet 2010

By William Nichols

978-1-897181-35-5

$15.95

The Snow Angel and the Taddei Madonna I don’t know if Michelangelo carved many birds. The one I saw

was a goldfinch emerging from white marble, in the hand of an

emerging child. A gift to baby Jesus on his mother’s lap. The

piece was unfinished, said the woman on my arm. I kept my

thoughts apart from her and her friends, all equally educated

in the renaissance, equally at home in London. Thoughts of me

and that goldfinch, unpolished, sharing something of the rustic

to bring them a smile. But for me, the way that bird occupied

space dissolved its surroundings, and mine.

The other morning in the sideways light of dawn, after the

coldest night I’ve lived through, there was, beside the truck,

in a snow bank, the perfect imprint of a blue jay: the wings,

tail, breast, holes for the feet. No feathers or fox tracks of

explanation, just a perfectly absent bird. The way that bird did

not occupy space pulled my religion into sharpest focus.

W I L L I A M N I C H O L S is a public policy

consultant based in Edmonton. Born in

Moose Jaw, his travels have always brought

him back to the prairies. Poetry is a

counterpoint to the words he produces for

business and government. When words fail

he likes bird watching and woodworking.

William’s muse is dyslexia. Though his is a

mild disability, it creates a continual tension

between the mind, the eye and the page. A

printed page can have as many possibilities

as a blank one, as the letters slowly swim

into words, possibilities are discarded, and

meanings emerge. In reverse, the idea can

come clear before the words to express it.

Language stays fresh and always potentially

treacherous. The technical precision

required of regulatory writing is in contrast

to the emotional clarity he seeks in his

poetry, although each has certainly

contributed to the other.

Falling Blues “familiar comforts … balanced on the knife edge of language” Falling Blues sings about edges and air, about fear, about letting go, jumping, plunging. The

poems chart some of the many ways we have of falling in and out (of love, of lines), of falling

for and under (spells, sinners, mystics), of falling off and down and getting back up and on

again. It`s about what throws and carries us, what we are given, what we learn and what – and

who – we take with us on the vertiginous journey through the body`s mischief, to the stillness

we imagine lies beyond falling.

Familiar comforts – marital beds, teacups – are balanced on the knife edge of language,

scissored into poetic forms from villanelle to blues. The result is attentive and disconcerting.

The beautiful success of this superb collection is due to the use of verbs, always freshly precise

and colourfully sound. —Jury, Dektet 2010

Praise for Jannie Edwards’ work

The book's rollercoaster ride through the terrain of the human heart is an absolute delight, full

of humour, hunger, joy and pain. —Carolyn Guerti, Other Voices

Edwards allows us an encounter with the grace that exists all around us when we catch a

glimpse of the “geometries of the heart.” A rare sensibility shines through each poem, and

Edwards’ insights create for the reader new possibilities of thirst. —Paul Wilson

By Jannie Edwards

978-1-897181-36-2

$15.95

The Future

January’s moon’s gone stale.

Weeks stammer their traffic.

The long marriage with weather

has us all enrolled in Doomsday, waiting for parole.

In the dream my mother is young again, slim

as still water. The abalone moon trembles

taut as a trampoline in its lack

of gravity. There are no footprints yet.

A hand-stitched trousseau fidgets

in its tissue: soon, soon.

My father is hard pressed, studying his biology, his maps.

There will be exams. There will be wars.

“Here I am,” I call to those beautiful, ruthless

creatures, my heart racing

against the clock. “Here I am,

your child, your dream.”

J A N N I E ED W A R D S was born in South

Africa and now lives and writes in

Edmonton, Alberta. Her second book of

poetry, Blood Opera: The Raven Tango

Poems, was a collaboration with visual

artist Paul Saturley and was adapted for

the stage by Edmonton’s Theatre

Prospero. Her videopoem, Engrams:

Reach and Seize Memory, is a

collaborative work inspired by the

installation tryptych of Edmonton artist

Darci Mallon. The work features

Edwards’ poetry translated into American

Sign Language and performed by Deaf

actor and translator Linda Cundy. Jannie

Edwards’s website is

http://www.jannieedwards.ca.

Learning to Count In Learning to Count, Douglas Burnet Smith explores the counterpoint between everyday, often

innocent, experiences and the darker elegiac tones of history. The lyricism of Tuscany’s

sublime skies merges into J.M.W. Turner’s obsession with clouds and the author’s own

retracing of Turner’s sources of inspiration. Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Louis Riel, Giuseppe

Garibaldi, Benito Mussolini, Robert Desnos, Napoleon and a contemplative lizard on a

Corsican mountainside all have their roles to play. In brutal contrast, the author, taking his own

child to a school in France, encounters horrifying evidence of the murder of hundreds of

children by French Nazi collaborators. But throughout, Smith measures the impact of his

encounters with distinctly Canadian insight and awareness. And so finally the journey returns

home, to Canada, to Halifax, Nova Scotia, where Pablo Picasso magically leads a naked chorus

line through the streets of the city. The journey has been exhilarating, exhausting, at times

almost unbearable – but always, always magical.

Praise for Douglas Burnet Smith’s work

Always, in our best poetry, the hovering care for place. Douglas Burnet Smith hears landscape;

he hears the way it resounds in the people who travel its subtle and complex surface. Landscape

for Smith is a kind of musical instrument. —Robert Kroetsch

Smith adeptly juxtaposes tough, laconic vernacular, vigorous imagery, and startling metaphor.

A poet whose resources are dynamic and unforgettable. —Event

Travel writing used to be a nostalgic adventure-story or anthropological ghetto of non-fiction.

This book shows that the experience of crossing borders and negotiating cultures is integral to

anyone alive to – and in – the world. The poems are a layered patina, evoking not only the

sensual present of France, Rome, Corsica and Halifax, but also their complex pasts, interpreted

over and over through art. —Jury, Dektet 2010

By Douglas Burnet Smith

978-1-897181-37-9

$15.95

From Surface to Air J.M.W. Turner in Italy, 1819

Like all those who last, he knew the subject

before he lived it, painting Italy in England

for paltry commissions: Vesuvius

glared at him out of a book, so he’d improve

its gaudy red with a wash of closed crocus

for a patron who fancied

reproduced spontaneity,

or he’d pass the engraved-gray

of its lava through a prism of coruscated lightning

for another who wanted a flashy gift for a lady.

His hand insisted

it was only and always about

description, adding

and taking away, gathering and draining light,

esse est percepi,

languishing in the vagueness between one colour and another,

ash-blue and mist-white and never

a singular knowing, only a sliding

from what is there to what isn’t to what is

and back again, understanding the Sublime

to be merely a small web of lustration, just

as the sun would poke through, retreat, then decide

that the sacrifice in reducing itself

to a wizened, snow-dusted sunflower

hovering over the Thames in January

was worth it

.

DO U G L A S B U R N E T SM I T H is the

author of over a dozen books of

poetry. His work has won the Malahat

Review’s Long Poem Prize, and has

been nominated for a Governor

General’s Award and the Atlantic

Poetry Prize. He has been Writer in

Residence at a number of universities

in Canada and the U. S., and has

served as President of the League of

Canadian Poets, as well as Chair of

the Public Lending Right Commission

of Canada. He teaches at St. Francis

Xavier University, in Antigonish,

Nova Scotia, and at the American

University of Paris. He divides his

time between Canada, France, and

Argentina.

[sic ] “poetry for the reactionary-challenged” [sic] thus written, error mine. Sic to incite to attack, especially as a command to a dog: "Sic

'em!" Siccing poetry on you. That’s sick, as in, awesome. Or ill and sickly. Either way, the

(gendered, sexualized) body is implicated. [sic] re-writes a feminist lyric within the long

shadow cast by neo-liberalism upon the city and its denizens, mis-remembers the lines and re-

inscribes the labour and commerce and sexual negotiations that take place there.

The poems in Nikki Reimer’s remarkable new book, [sic], stubbornly violate the breath line,

salute drive-by aneurisms and prince charles maxi-pads, and take innocent testicles hostage as

they expose the nostalgic underbelly of subverbia [sic]. “Remember if there’s smoke,” Reimer

cautions, as she continually unremembers the gentrified and gendered ex-city. Poetry for the

reactionary-challenged; before gobbling up this yummy dirt and mucus and icing-sugar die[t],

you might prefer to slap on a condom, or an extra ovum. —Nicole Markotić

Walter Benjamin did not work at Tim Hortons. Nor did he “work at the local earl’s and never

leave the neighbourhood.” But who doesn’t love cities and their edges? That doesn’t mean we

have to walk around like flaneurs. Most people have to drag their bodies to work and make

their bodies work. What would poetry that asks “does anybody work here?” look like, how

would it make and break a sentence? What city would this poetry make its capital of

modernity? How would such a poetry love a “stucco shithouse”? This is to say that Nikki

Reimer’s [sic] is a book that Henri Lefebvre would love because it is wild in the way he

wanted cities to be. —Jeff Derksen

Gorilla condoms? Goldilocks’ bent-over cootchie? Gonzo cocaine? Everything’s 4-sale when

language is loosed as it is ici (icy) (sic). These poems are a pile-up of pop culture at “the

intersection of Art and Commerce”, and the city is caught at the stoplight. —Jury, Dektet 2010

by nikki reimer

978-1-897181-38-6

$15.95

to do list: become my own cultural flashpoint admit that all this time i had

no idea what the Hips were saying market my own line of hipster

greeting cards

– hey, sorry i got you evicted

design and implement original lingerie emerge unscathed from

the 21st

century date a godly guy grow my wavy goldilocks stamp

“brand me” all over this town in light of the fact that secondary

sex characteristics are everything i have to improve my eyeglass

value grow my own agribusiness wax and polish buff and shine

eminize my grooming snort my first icing sugar sex up the

“bottom” line deliver the goods not the baby marry the vision

not the mailman bank on a lemon zest return invest in my ice

cream settle my income flax fetch my last cup of coffee

a fairytale of kensington (apologies to the Pogues)

gin bile truckers stop middle class slumming

Lido $2.88 breakfast special eggs over easy & coffee

& coffee grease denim ballcaps ring merry ac/dc white

trash spare change suburban kids toss pennies and throw

jam suburban kids call breakfast pocket change

block aisles with green and gold paper

i ♥ yr mullet

i (c) yr eyebags

i ♠ yr pussy

merry cowtown christmas, asshole

N I K K I R E I M E R is a poet, blogger,

curator, arts event planner, and cat

photographer, in East Vancouver. Recent

work has appeared in W, West Coast Line,

Matrix, Front, Prism International

and BafterC, and two of her poems were

featured in the poetryinspired dance show

“Larimer St.” performed by Decidedly

Jazz Danceworks in 2005. Her chapbook,

fist things first, was published by Wrinkle

Press in 2009. Reimer was a founding

editor of (orange) magazine, a co-editor

and designer of KSW’s W12: All Music

issue, and creator of the disjunct!

performance series. She has blogged for

Lemon Hound and the Vancouver

International Writers & Readers Festival.

Reimer lives in Vancouver where she is a

member of the Kootenay School of

Writing and a board member at W2

Community Media Arts. She blogs at

http://nikkireimer.com. [sic] is her first

full-length book of poetry.

Standoff Terrain Standoff Terrain takes its inspiration from Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. It is a book of love poems

for losers, and since almost everybody has lost at love… well, this book is probably for you. In

the end, these poems are about how power – and lack of power – affect who and why we love.

It's hard to imagine a new twist on the dating game, but Standoff Terrain offers boy-meets-girl as

a war game. Conducted to the accompaniment of pithy sayings from Sun Tzu’s The Art of War,

Benoit's poems cover all the hope and disappointment, the explorations of compatibility and its

absence, involved in the militant pursuit of love. As Benoit's would-be lovers attempt “to decide

between love and / Independence”, they encounter on the one hand practitioners of S & M or an

emotional scorched earth policy, but on the other hand also stumble upon surprisingly tender

moments. Benoit's wit and wry perspective keep the whole collection bubbling. The Art of War

subtly reminds us that affairs of the heart, like affairs of the sword, have been a quintessential

part of being human for eons. Benoit's stunning achievement is to make it fresh one more time.

—Tom Wayman

In these fresh, candid poems, Jocko Benoit takes the high ideals of romance down to the streets.

The republic of love is one hell of a battlefield, in Benoit’s poems, but there’s laughter here, too

– Archie Bunker reading the Marquis de Sade is surely a “first” in Canadian poetry. And don’t

let Benoit’s “loser-in-love” persona fool you – he doesn’t wallow in self-pity. Rather, he’s a

wistfully humble student of the world, always willing to jump back into the pool even when he’s

hit bottom. A collection of admirable spirit and craft. —Jeanette Lynes

A guy looks for love in all the wrong places, but comes up with all the right lines. What happens

when Sun Tzu’s The Art of War meets the Indian erotic-religious text The Kama Sutra? Well,

you get philosophical verse that’s fun, frank, and funky. —Jury, Dektet 2010

by Jocko Benoit

978-1-897181-39-3

$15.95

Scoping

The terrain is to be assessed in terms

of distance, difficulty or ease of travel,

dimension, and safety. —Sun Tzu

Her perimeters seem easily mapped,

Standard grid – though the usual squares

Bulge from her curves. But try to breech

Her fears, surmount her inhibitions

And I'm caught in a nervous barbed wire smile.

If I look long enough at her eyes

The pupils become Rorschach blots.

One day her face sags, the next it is

Impenetrable. She is the floor of a lake,

The deepest parts seeming close enough

To touch. Her moods are an open book

Rifled by crosswinds.

Perspective is difficult in this heat.

One minute she seems to be miles away,

Back to me, a concentrated point of disinterest,

And then I find I'm surrounded, in the centre

Where she camps. She shuts and locks the door

The way she might a telescope.

J O C K O B E N O I T was born in

Montreal and raised in Cape Breton,

and explored the rest of Canada one

university at a time until arriving in

Edmonton, where he lived as a poetic

marauder with the Stroll of Poets. He

has written one collection of poetry, An

Anarchist Dream, and his poems have

appeared in magazines in Canada, the

U.S., England and Australia. His stories

have appeared in On Spec and

Tesseracts. His screenplays have been

shortlisted in competitions in Canada

and the U.S. He lives in Calgary with

his wife and son.

White Shirt Laurie MacFayden navigates love, longing, lust and loss with deft wordplay and disarming wit,

plumbing our most intimate relationships – those entwining family, friends, lovers and exlovers.

Her rich imagery, combined with an ability to locate the extraordinary in the everyday, results in

poems that range from playful to poignant as she celebrates the complexities of the human heart.

In this debut collection, best friends scream downhill on their ten-speed bikes; a tree planter

spells out her lover’s name in seedlings; and a mysterious entity steps out of the mist in Stanley

Park. The author contemplates how best to seduce Joan of Arc and goes on an abstract-

expressionist date with Jackson Pollock. Like the white shirt in the title, these poems are crisp,

seductive and a little bit sweaty.

Laurie MacFayden is one of my favourite poets. Her poems vibrate with a sensorial precision

that never fails to capture. From a wild date with Jackson Pollock, to poems of longing and

desire, to clear-eyed rants on sexuality, she does what all great writers do – that is, she shines

her incredible, unique light on what it is to be human. MacFayden pushes at the darkness with

her poetry – she titillates, teases, intrigues and entertains – and I hope she keeps doing it for a

very, very long time. —Thomas Trofimuk

when i first heard laurie macfayden read in edmonton, it was obvious she was a cut above the

pack of poets waiting for their turn to be heard. she's a drag queen in a pink limousine, journalist

of whyte ave & the two-lane world, an important lady in an important time. —c.r. avery

This is the “classic” hard-drinking, hard-living, gravelly poet’s voice – only it comes from a

woman. It’s a bust-out-of-the-closet voice where occasional touchstone rhymes and furious lists

score the page. The poems are stripped down, poignant, exact, and as heartily playful as any

serious blues. Here is Sappho crossed with the Supremes. —Jury, Dektet 2010

by Laurie MacFayden

978-1-897181-40-9

$15.95

white shirt didn’t see it coming

blindsided by the drag king of romance

she hooks me with a crisp white shirt and levi’s

i go weak in the knees from one sultry sideways glance

she leans in close, lookin’ way too good and scented so fine

part ralphie lauren and a splash of merlot wine

grabs my hand: we have to dance

she tugs my belt / i’m in a trance

she’s a sexy honeyboy and i don’t stand a chance

my guts are churning / munch’s painted scream

my heart’s a splattered pollock drip

she is thunder she is steam

her tongue is metal lightning on my lip

and she looks like the best of my ex-lovers

all rolled into one

and she looks like four aces a cathedral quicksilver

and she looks like pewter justice indigo

and she smells like vanilla sandalwood sweat

and she tastes like juicy fruit gum

and she tastes like hot chocolate with a hint of rum

and there’s something about her that i just can’t name

like red smarties and halley’s comet

and an outdoor hockey game

and she smiles like everything i never dared hope for

and she grooves like stained glass, double latte extra foam

and she moves like san francisco

and she grinds like new orleans

when she whispers, i hope you have the balls

to take me home

LA U R I E M A CF A Y D E N grew up in

southern Ontario and has lived in

Edmonton since 1984. She spent 30 years

as a sports journalist, most recently at the

Edmonton Journal. She left the news

media in June 2007 to focus on her own

writing and visual arts projects. This is her

debut collection of poetry.

A painter, photographer and avid traveller,

Laurie is a frequent performer on the

Raving Poets’ open-mic stage in Edmonton.

She is a member of the Writers Guild of

Alberta, Edmonton’s Stroll of Poets, the

Edmonton Arts Council and the Visual Arts

Alberta Association. She blogs at

http://spatherdab.wordpress.com and her art

lives at www.lauriemacfayden.com

Frontenac House, Spring 2010Frontenac House, Spring 2010Frontenac House, Spring 2010Frontenac House, Spring 2010

Amazing Flights and Flyers, By Shirlee Smith Matheson, February, 2010

Matheson’s latest exploration in aviation, is a chronicle of some of the extreme

experiences in flight since the beginning of the 20th century.

978-1-897181-29-4, $19.95

All Roads Lead to Manyberries, by Ron Wood, June, 2010

All the news from Manyberries since the release of And God Created Manyberries,

shortlisted for the Leacock Medal for Humour.

978-1-897181-41-6, $21.95

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