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Méira Cook w/Naomi Guttman & Carolyn Marie Souaid -- Book Launch

Thursday Jun 04 2015 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.

Launch of Monologue Dogs (Brick Books) featuring visiting guest poets Naomi Guttman and Carolyn Marie Souaid co-presented by the Envoi Poetry Festival and Brick Books.

Monologue Dogs is a series of contemporary dramatic monologues. Every “voice” has its own imagined rhythm and nuances of poetic speech that are as vibrant, wayward, mournful, errant, or unruly as the characters who speak. Setting the lyric against street argot, archaic language against deflating or ironic feints, metaphors against declarative sentences, the elegiac against the ribald, classical or literary allusions against anachronistic references, these monologues reflect our own disordered subjectivities.

Méira Cook has published four poetry collections with Brick Books. Monologue Dogs is her fifth poetry collection. Her first novel, The House on Sugarbush Road, won the McNally Robinson Manitoba Book of the Year Award. Her second novel, Nightwatching, will appear in Spring 2015. She lives in Winnipeg.

Méira is joined this evening by two special guests: The first, Naomi Guttman, won the A.M. Klein Award for Poetry for her first book Reasons for Winter. Her second, Wet Apples, White Blood, was co-winner of the Adirondack Center for Writing’s Best Book of Poems for 2007. The Banquet of Donny & Ari: Scenes from the Opera (Brick Books), a sweeping novella-in-verse set under the sugar maples of Montreal, is her third poetry collection. Raised in Montreal, she now teaches creative writing at Hamilton College in Clinton, NY.

Our second guest poet is Carolyn Marie Souaid, the author of six books of poetry. Her work has been shortlisted for a number of literary awards, including the A.M. Klein Poetry Prize and the Pat Lowther Award. She was born and raised in Montreal, where she still makes her home. This World We Invented (Brick Books) is her seventh poetry collection and further highlights her razor-sharp eye for detail as it roams and redeems imperfections both personal and collective.

See:

Monologue Dogs

- Meira Cook

Trade paperback $20.00
Reader Reward Price: $18.00

Dazzling collection of masques from Manitoba Book of the Year- and Walrus Poetry Prize-winning author.

Monologue Dogs is a series of contemporary dramatic monologues. Every "voice" has its own imagined rhythm and nuances of poetic speech that are as vibrant, wayward, mournful, errant, or unruly as the characters who speak. Setting the lyric against street argot, archaic language against deflating or ironic feints, metaphors against declarative sentences, the elegiac against the ribald, classical or literary allusions against anachronistic references, these monologues reflect our own disordered subjectivities. In the words of Molly Peacock: "Read her for a fresh, contemporary and knowing sensibility--not to mention an unforgettable sense of humour."

Suddenly the car drops down on all fours
and will go no further. Arrival is neither here
nor there, mother says, searching for her key.
But her key is in the last lost pocket of the world's
overcoat and tonight -- tonight the forest is ajar.


--from "The Hunger Artists"

Praise for Monologue Dogs:

"Again Méira Cook proves herself to be one of Canada's most compelling poets." --Molly Peacock.

"These are poems to read and reread with growing pleasure and admiration."--Steven Heighton

Banquet of Donny & Ari, The

- Naomi Guttman

Trade paperback $20.00
Reader Reward Price: $18.00

Under the sugar maples of Montreal, family life is given mythic dimensions in this sweeping novella-in-verse.

If Dionysus and Ariadne lived in Montreal in the late twentieth century, would he serve veal stuffed with apples and paté de fois gras? Coach nubile young singers in a performance of L'Orfeo? Would Ariadne's thread be fashioned into tapestries of furious elegy in the face of environmental catastrophe? Would their marriage survive?

Amid a fictional marriage in a state of malaise and a real world on the edge of environmental disaster, Guttman lays open moments of vexation and tenderness, of grief, guilt, betrayal and love. Sounding through these moments are the harpsichord and the loom, drawing Donny and Ari, their sons Stephan and Onno, their corgie and their parrot, into the long weave of myth, art and human history.

Donny envies her the order of her threads, neatness of the loom, palettes of skeins piled high. Compare this to the score he must unwind, ingest, to play by heart. The orchestra accompanying the voices is Orfeo's lyre.

--from "Rehearsals: Mastery"

Praise for Naomi Guttman: "Richly detailed, passionate, witty, despairing, and brave, the lyric force of these poems conveys most of all a deep knowledge and love of a complex but recognizable world." -- Peter Meinke

This World We Invented

- Carolyn Marie Souaid

Trade paperback $20.00
Reader Reward Price: $18.00

A razor-sharp eye for detail roams and redeems imperfections both personal and collective.

The world in Carolyn Marie Souaid's latest collection is both an act of the imagination and a responsibility. Souaid's poems zoom in and out, shifting focus to accommodate varied dimensions of experience. We move from the breakdown of a relationship to primordial ooze to a suicide bomb to a son doing his math homework. In a disarmingly personable voice, Souaid investigates our darker moments, faces up to losses and failures both intimate and public, often with wry humour. If our world is an imperfect invention, it is also, for Souaid, a source of wonder-- where "the trick was not to fall asleep but to notice everything / in its brevity."

I've no idea what it is to be moss or jade
in the spectrum of green. There are no patterns;
there is no good light to measure anything by.
The laws of physics drop like an ax.


In the end, the body doesn't keep.

--from "Where Night Takes Me"

Praise for This World We Invented:

"These bold, important poems have grappled with beauty and chosen honesty ... [T]hey offer no easy consolations, but because they are made things ... they reflect a hope for change." --Stephanie Bolster