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Patrick Friesen -- Book Launch

Thursday Oct 27 2011 7:00 pm, Winnipeg, Grant Park in the Atrium
NOTE: This event has already taken place. Please visit this page to see our upcoming events.

Winnipeg launch of jumping in the asylum (Quattro Books).

Patrick Friesen, formerly of Winnipeg, now lives on Vancouver Island. He writes poetry, drama, scripts, songs, text for dance and music, and has collaborated with a wide range of musicians, dancers and choreographers. Friesen has published more than a dozen books of poetry. He has also written two full-length plays staged at various theatres in Canada. Friesen was short-listed for the Governor General’s Award for poetry in 1997. He was also short-listed for the Dorothy Livesay Award in BC in 1998, and again in 2003. In 1994 his book Blasphemer’s Wheel won the McNally Robinson Book of the Year award in Manitoba.

Wide-ranging in subject, deeply intuitive and layered in style, influenced equally by the cadences of jazz and of the Bible, the poems in jumping in the asylum will stand out among this distinguished author’s strongest work.

See:

Blasphemer's Wheel

- Patrick Friesen

Trade paperback $12.95
Reader Reward Price: $11.66

Winner of the 1994 McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award.

You Don't Get to Be a Saint is a sharp-edged collage full of the echoes of human movement and voice. Winner of the 1994 McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award, Blasphemer's Wheel is a representative collection of Patrick Friesen's work, including selections from The Shunning, Flicker and Hawk, Unearthly Horses and you Don't Get to Be a Saint.

Broken Bowl, A

- Patrick Friesen

Trade paperback $12.95
Reader Reward Price: $11.66

Set firmly at the end of the millennium, A Broken Bowl takes on the burden of history, with its heaped atrocities, its unimaginable sufferings. This long poem is an angry lament, a summoning of fragments, a meditation in the midst of an exhausted world. By turns lyric, satiric, elegiac and incantatory, A Broken Bowl is filled with passionate elemental writing in the tradition of Howl and Crow.

"Picture-building poetry doesn't get better than this. Patrick Friesen communicates directly to your imagination. These fragments of a broken bowl are, indeed, much greater than the sum of their parts as they spur imaginal encounters not only with Friesen but with the scattered bits of the reader's self - each piece a new gesture to try on." -- Per Brask.

"These are the end days - someone's got a kitchen knife and is 'looking for the government' the river is a 'filthy transfusion.' Patrick Friesen sings this dark song with beauty and a guttering love. We're long past apology, reconstruction: there's only Friesen's voice not nearly enough, sure, but the only thing worthy of trust." -- Tim Lilburn.

NOMINATED for the 1997 Governor General's Award for Poetry.

Shunning

- Patrick Friesen

Trade paperback $8.95
Reader Reward Price: $8.06

The Shunning 'tears heads off cliches, making us see a whole place freshly. It is a complete world, reeling and tilting but enduring. A fine book, full of bone and muscle. A totality.' Christopher Wiseman, Books in Canada 'The Shumnning shuns easy answers and offers a complex vision of lives in all their contradictions. It's a powerful, humane and moving book.' Douglas Barbour, Toronto Star.

The Shunning

- Patrick Friesen

Trade paperback $14.95
Reader Reward Price: $13.46

The story of one man struggling to express his personal views within a society that demands conformity.Peter is trying to live a good life, a faithful life. When he begins to question the doctrine of his Mennonite church and his faith in general, he is ostracized from the community. A decree by the church forces his wife to abandon him if not in person, then in spirit. The strain of domestic and community pressures forces Peter deeper into isolation, but he still refuses to stop questioning. Integrating dance, text and tragedy, The Shunning blends movement and spoken word that will carry you through a sea of emotions.

Earth's Crude Gravities

- Patrick Friesen

Trade paperback $16.95
Reader Reward Price: $15.26

Longlisted for the 2008 ReLit Award for PoetryEarth's Crude Gravities is both a meditation and an argument, a compelling series of poems on the world of matter and the world of spirit. Acclaimed poet Patrick Friesen muses on the religion that has been such a key part of his own background--but he also raises uncertainties.Whether he is discussing his love of the material world or the fictional creation of a narrative in religion, Friesen's poetry is elegant, eloquent and imagistic.

The Breath You Take from the Lord

- Patrick Friesen

Trade paperback $16.95
Reader Reward Price: $15.26

The Breath You Take From The Lord is a masterful volume that confirms Patrick Friesen's reputation as one of Canada's finest and most versatile poets. In language striking in its simplicity and strength, Friesen's work moves with the controlled intensity of a hawk circling in a vast prairie sky. These are poems infused with a sense of reverie and innocence, wisdom and clarity, reflections on those things, material and ethereal, that define who we are and where we come from. Drawing on old stories, the stark landscape of the prairie, the rain and mist of Canada's West Coast and the characters of his childhood, Friesen takes the reader on a human quest for the divine.

Carrying the Shadow

- Patrick Friesen

Trade paperback $12.95
Reader Reward Price: $11.66

Patrick Friesen's newest collection is a haunting ode to the lives we have felt too briefly, known only in passing and yearn to hold still. While those who loved them keen softly between his lines, Friesen invokes their loss as one remembers a cool breath on the back of the neck, a faint shadow on a headstone, a watermark on the bedstand. With wisdom and beauty and invention, Friesen walks us through the graveyard of human kind where a symphony of voices still conduct the lives left behind long after they depart flesh for spirit. Intermingling prose poems and traditional free verse, Friesen both narrates and sings the stories of absence and forgetting, tales of lingering memory and fleeting love. With infinite candor and sensitivity, Friesen celebrates the lives of idols and iconoclasts, wives and widows, farmers and freeloaders. For anyone who has urged another title in the canon of Friesen's award-winning work, here is a collection worthy of accolade. Death has no dominion, but poetry has dominion over all.