ECW Press Fall 2022 Trade
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Distributor: Jaguar Book Group Availability: Available Expected Ship Date: Aug 30, 2022 On Sale Date: Sep 20, 2022 Carton Quantity: 44 $21.95 CAD
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Supply Detail
Distributor: BTPS Availability: Available Expected Ship Date: Aug 30, 2022 On Sale Date: Sep 20, 2022 Carton Quantity: 44 $21.95 USD
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Catalogues
SeasonalECW Press Fall 2022 Trade
The Most Charming Creatures
Poems
By (author):
Gary Barwin
Gary Barwin
Imprint:
ECW Press - TorontoISBN:
9781770416611Product Form:
PaperbackForm detail:
Trade
Paperback
, Trade
English
Audience:
General Trade
Sep 20, 2022
$21.95 CAD
Active
Dimensions:
8.5in x 5.5 x 0.42 in | 0.54 lbPage Count:
128 pages
ECW Press
POETRY / Canadian
Poetry
Canada
- Short Description
- Description
- Author Bio
- Reviews
With uncanny wit, inventive beauty, and numinous surprise, The Most Charming Creatures explores the contemporary and its language, considering our wonder, sorrow, bewilderment, anxiety, and tenderness.
With uncanny wit, inventive beauty, and numinous surprise, The Most Charming Creatures explores the contemporary and its language, considering our wonder, sorrow, bewilderment, anxiety, and tenderness. While these poems energize and connect and “turn the paren- / theses inside out so that / we mean everything,” they are also alive to the alluring complicity of language and its duplicity and deceptions. “This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but / while we watch.”
A follow-up to the award-winning author’s acclaimed selected poems, this new collection continues Barwin’s examination of the possibilities of the poem: a celebration, a story, an investigation, a riff, a word machine, a parable, a transformation. But what are the “most charming creatures” of the title? In 1862, scientific illustrator Ernst Haeckel termed radiolarians (ancient single-celled organisms with mineral skeletons) “the most charming creatures,” but here Barwin turns the microscope around to consider something just as strange and mysterious: language, our culture, and the self. From microorganisms, onion rings, grief, and Gerard Manley Hopkins to beetles, neoliberalism, sandwiches, Martin Luther, and stand-up comedy, he offers: “it’s a miracle that we’ve survived / it’s a miracle that we’ve survived at all.”
Sales and Market Bullets
- CRITICALLY ACCLAIMED MULTIDISCIPLINARY AUTHOR: Barwin is a respected poet and an accomplished novelist, winner of the 2016 Leacock Medal for Humour, and twice the Canadian Jewish Literary Award. Barwin has been nominated for most major Canadian writing prizes including the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Governor General’s Award, and the National Magazine Awards. He is also a composer with a Ph.D. in music composition and was a writer-in-residence at Western University, Laurier University, Univerity of Toronto, McMaster University, Sheridan College, Hamilton Public Library, Hillfield Strathallan College, London Public Library, and Toronto Public Library.
- EACH POEM IS STRANGE AND SURPRISING: Using translation, mistranslation, anecdote, and fables, and drawing often mischievous inspiration from YouTube, National Geographic, canonical poems, CanLit, science, slang, friendship, and Soviet children’s animations, The Most Charming Creatures addresses how the body and language mediate our experience of the world, both consoling and challenging us.
Audience
- Contemporary poetry readers
- CanLit poetry crowd and reviewers
The bestselling author of 26 books of fiction and poetry, Gary Barwin has won the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour, the Canadian Jewish Literary Award, and has been a finalist for the Governor General’s Award and the Scotiabank Giller Prize. He lives in Hamilton, ON.
“There’s a way through which Barwin’s surrealism and play with puns and banter display, most of all, a deep empathy and engagement with others, something always present in his work, but somehow more forefront through the poems in this particular collection. And perhaps that, by itself, is the difference here: Barwin wearing his heart so openly, while still allowing language and play to swirl around that particular centre.” — rob mclennan’s blog
“[Gary Barwin's] latest delightful effusion of verse The Most Charming Creatures only adds to the accomplishment of his selected, For It Is a Pleasure and a Surprise to Breathe from 2019.” — WordCityLit blog
