Editorial: Bu Classics Books
An idealistic major in the Salvation Army faces a crisis of conscience when she realizes her charitable work is funded by whiskey and cannons. This intellectual powerhouse of a play challenges conventional morality, forcing a confrontation between the sanctity of poverty and the brutal efficacy of wealth.
For the multitaskers, the overreactors, the silent screamers and the quiet lovers Everybody Is a Poem: Midlife in Rhymes is Jan Brierton's second collection. Inspired by Jan's popular podcast these 52 poems delve into the darkest and brightest moments of our day, month or year. Combining rhyme and illustration, Jan puts simple words to those deepest of feelings. She riffs on menopause, midlife, the mental load, friendships, relationships, loss and self-acceptance. Plain-speaking and completely relatable, each poem is served with Jan's signature combination of humour, wit and poignancy. This is poetry for everybody.Ver libro
Welcome y'all! This project was created for those who think they don't like Shakespeare. It is a completely unsanctioned and unconventional interpretation of some of the works of William Shakespeare. If you are a purist be forewarned! I have always been fascinated with the written works of Shakespeare since I was a child trying to decipher the giant volume of his works I discovered in my father's library. I knew it was important historically but the language had me often running to a dictionary in those pre-Google days. Understanding a live performance was an equally challenging task as the British accents combined with the lambic pentameter rhythm left me struggling to understand the meaning. But once you figure what he's saying you realized these timeless stories of dysfunctional families and political intrigue are just as relevant today as 400 years ago. Every actor in training experiences the works of William Shakespeare to some degree. While memorizing lines I would try various characters and accents. For Richard III's famous opening monologue I settled on a genteel aristocrat from the Southern United States. I shared with my instructor and after some initial eye rolls he had to admit it was easier to understand. Eventually I created a one man show around the idea and wrote original songs that I believe express the emotion and underlying intentions of the pieces. And of course what's a variety show without an MC or two. In this case two squabbling siblings Auntie Bella and her twin brother Beauregard to bring a small respite to the drama. During the COVID pandemic I decided to record an audio version of the show. I hope you enjoy my family of misfits as much as I did creating them. But hey, to thine own taste be true. Cousin Willy must have had a sense of humor to write some of this stuff!Ver libro
CBC BOOKS CANADIAN POETRY COLLECTIONS TO WATCH FOR IN FALL 2023What can we remove from ourselves and still be ourselves? Written after a brain tumour diagnosis, The King of Terrors is a treatise on living with illness and the way that language, relationships and our immersion in the natural world can free us from the spectre of impending collapse. Johnstone's poems oscillate between the personal and the public, the clinical and the spiritual, so we're never quite sure what we are seeing, no matter how familiar."There is a moving, fierce intensity to The King of Terrors. Jim Johnstone knowingly reminds us that betrayals of the body are also betrayals of language, ‘each bloody / mouthful a sentence fragment.’ These are lines of admission, ambition, and harrowing truth, and Johnstone – despite a future only as certain ‘as the body // it inhabits’ – offers a form of redemption, for the fortitude of the sick, for poetry itself." – Randall Mann, author of Deal: New and Selected Poems "The King of Terrors is a luminous meditation on the otherworld of illness and treatment, contemplating the mysteries of death and the frontiers of mind and body with sharp clarity and radical vulnerability. These mesmerizing, urgent poems admit us not only to waiting rooms and brain scans, but also to the intimate fears that accompany the estranging experience of being unwell, or, as the poet says, living 'between / age and agency.' Haunting, stark, and lyrical, The King of Terrors is charged, as all the best poetry is, with the shock of the mortal." – Sarah Holland-Batt, author of The JaguarVer libro
Lyrical poetry inspired by popular songs, Rogal sweeps the reader through the journey of creation. In More Songs the Radio Won’t Play, Stan Rogal takes formerly “popular” tunes (from various genres) and transforms them. Self-referentiality; mashups of the erudite and profane; allusions to other arts and sciences; the insertion and bending of biographical and historical facts; problematic snippets of philosophy and literary theory, quotes, and bastardizations; deploying non- or a-political language to challenge notions of how a poem should work; sampling; and off-kilter humour work together to update Rogal’s playlist for a present-day audience. While his poems unavoidably serve to comment on the world today, Rogal resists a central message. The true emphasis of this collection is on the process of creation. It’s not the destination but the journey that is of significance. Not mere cover versions, not exactly parodies (though parodic), these poems are redactions, mutations, Frankenstein’s monsters … they resemble the original — somewhat — yet are also grossly different.Ver libro
Amy LeBlanc’s debut poetry collection, I know something you don’t know, resides in the intersection of folklore and femininity. With fairy-tale lucidity and fluid voice, the poems in this collection weave through the seams between story and fact. This debut collection is alluring and noxious like hemlock, foxglove, and blooming wildflowers.Ver libro
LONGLISTED FOR THE 2023 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR POETRY "Where are you from . . . ? No—where are you from from?" It's a question every Asian American gets asked as part of an incessant chorus saying you'll never belong here, you're a perpetual foreigner, you'll always be seen as an alien, an object, or a threat. Monica Youn's From From brilliantly evokes the conflicted consciousness of deracination. If you have no core of "authenticity," no experience of your so-called homeland, how do you piece together an Asian American identity out of Westerners' ideas about Asians? Your sense of yourself is part stereotype, part aspiration, part guilt. In this dazzling collection, one sequence deconstructs the sounds and letters of the word "deracinations" to create a sonic landscape of micro- and macroaggressions, assimilation, and self-doubt. A kaleidoscopic personal essay explores the racial positioning of Asian Americans and the epidemic of anti-Asian hate. Several poems titled "Study of Two Figures" anatomize and dissect the Asian other: Midas the striving, nouveau-riche father; Dr. Seuss and the imaginary daughter Chrysanthemum-Pearl he invented while authoring his anti-Japanese propaganda campaign; Pasiphaë, mother of the minotaur, and Sado, the eighteenth-century Korean prince, both condemned to containers allegorical and actual.Ver libro
