Readings: Join Gillian Jerome for a reading featuring her recent book of poetry, Red Nest, at Collected Works Bookstore, 1242 Wellington St. West, at 7.30 p.m. Jerome will read alongside author Chris Hutchinson, who will present from his latest book OTHER PEOPLE'S LIVES. Info: (613) 722-1265

Red Nest

by
Gillian Jerome

A debut book of poetry from an award-winning author.

"Red Nest is a deeply political book without the cant. This first book argues passionately for the interconnectedness of all our everyday actions with the larger, political and cosmic forces shaping the destiny of our species. It's got the scope of Whitman, the sensuality of Keats, the ferocity of Kathy Acker and Sylvia Plath."

—Suzanne Buffam

Enter the surreal adventure that is Gillian Jerome's debut collection of domestic, urban and intergalactic eclogues. Just when you’ve been ambushed by gods and stars, you're catapulted back into a wild sprawling city filled with cordless phones, coyotes and the hairdos of dandelions. The brave and rambunctious creatures in this book nest in the humour and horror of the 21st-century.

Other Peoples Lives,</> by Chris Hutchinson

Exciting music, delicious ironies, radiant self-awareness.

With imagination, wit and scrupulous candour, Chris Hutchinson’s poems negotiate and renegotiate the shifting no-man’s-land between self and others, introspection and public life. Here are poems carrying unflinching perceptions on their own innovative, edgy music, refusing inflations of rhetoric and complacent notions of the inner life, bringing skeptical intelligence and radical imagination—those supposedly incompatible room-mates—into electrical connection. The result is a poetry of daring honesty, close observation, and humanity, executed with exhilarating verve and humour.

Each day’s a notch on the oven dial
the sadistic hand of summer turns. The locals here
wear mirrored glasses with the mirrors reversed!
Was I ever filled with sweetness and courage?
For miles and miles the asphalt unwinds, the river’s
evil twin. So is desire your enemy’s friend,
goes the jazz of imagined footsteps

slapping the city’s impervious skin. So each day
lapses, un-spools each night as I go scheming
ways to continue, safe within and darkly through
an immaterial sublime. But the walls are sweating
and the windows here peer in towards this sheltered
corner of the universe—where I’m in trouble again
with words, and other people’s lives.

– from "Cross-Sections"

Product Details

  • Paperback: 128 pages
  • Publisher: Brick Books (July 15 2009)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 1894078756
  • ISBN-13: 978-1894078757
  • Product Dimensions: 21.8 x 16 x 1.1 cm
  • Shipping Weight: 250 g

OTTAWA INTERNATIONAL POETS AND WRITERS FOR HUMAN RIGHTS (OIPWHR)

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Ottawa International Poets and Writers for human Rights (OIPWHR)