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BC Books From the Mainland/Southwest
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BC Books From the Mainland/Southwest

Created by ABPBC on May 21, 2015
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tagged: Lower Mainland, BC
Books written by authors living in BC's Lower Mainland.
Entering Time

Entering Time

The Fungus Man Platters of Charles Edenshaw
by Colin Browne
edition:Paperback
also available: eBook
tagged : native american studies, canadian studies

During the groundbreaking Charles Edenshaw exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 2013, poet Colin Browne found himself returning often to study three large argillite platters carved by the Haida master in the late 1800s. Produced several years apart, each depicts an identical scene at the same moment: two frightened figures in a canoe appear to be on a mission. One is the Raven, in supernatural form, brandishing a spear; the other, in the stern, is a human-like figure with a circular head. …

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for love and autonomy

for love and autonomy

by A Jamali Rad
edition:Paperback
tagged : canadian

Anahita Jamali Rad’s debut book of poetry juxtaposes Marxist economics with pop culture lyrics, from FKA Twigs to Sonic Youth, tangling the "You & I" of relationships and social identification. She asks: How is it possible to communicate when the "I" speaks from the margins? Who is the "I" when Motown’s doo-wop and post-punk’s Telecaster jangles shake up the body’s rhythm?

 

for love and autonomy speaks from a place of discomfort, where internalized pop songs mutate communication and mean …

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Excerpt

fragmenting
procedures

 

anahita jamali rad

 

[first few poems]

 

The “Political” Against the Politics of Attack

 

By destroying the myth that mutilates us, the organisation to organise autonomously to transcend autonomy transcends autonomy. A certain ethics of a familiar jubilance. We said they said we said they said, at any rate, perhaps, the last is not the least.
Now, study carefully the meaning of “divide.” You will have no need to study the numerous influences which give the division of labour a definite character.
Monotonous, trivial chores, coupled with sexual passivity. Only separate in words.
We are poor technicians of desire. Exposing the physical mechanism that dominates and exploits us. Historical bodies, or bodies of a history limited by a desire that is not ours, a desire that is unable to mobilise us. A desire that discredits our desires to not be enamoured by the constant generator.
Mutilated by work, multiplying forms and domains for the intervention of political action. We discover we are confronted by obliteration and consumption. A partial list, they say:
1. She wants more. Tyrannised and lacks power. Grounds a political translation of real power, enamoured. But the other is more fundamental. To consume more consumes this greater and greater consumption. Demands another kind of distribution. Of being and organising for the money. Everything is done for the money. The money works hard. Works hard for the money. The only one who does any work around here.
3. She is in “rivalry,” primarily more attractive than, more consumptive than, more pressure than. The times express a protection of the living standards, of reproduction for production. So much so that she lives for men, dresses for men, works for men, is for men.
5. She buries in the home the refuse of the struggle. Herself, the refuse, herself, she refuses. Exists only in the home, is outside invisible. Is outside a dirty window. Is outside into the home.
Will argue, there has been a fundamental misunderstanding. Of women from socialised production. Of heroic mother and happy housewife. Of being surrounded by goods. Makes love at night in the interest of the class. And has internalised the capitalist gaze. Disciplines with a forced smile, disciplines future capitalist subjects. And it’s not the same as making love during the day. Never assumes to make love during the day. A biological presumption. A petty sexual rivalry for a secure mate. It is in the anatomy. A womb from beginning to always, in which the woman is joined by her husband and children. It is precisely at this point that the whole story begins.

 

Politics of Attack

 

autonomy transcends autonomy. and jubilance. we said what they said.
And now it weighs down on us. These observations this desire that mutilates our work. Our bodies.
You’ve been in the house too long, she said.
A dirty window into a dirty room. A new kind of social immobility
learnt by bitter experience.

 

Against Attack

 

Now this, in the family, is productive.
1.
She is a miserable available working population.

 

2.
She is a monstrosity.

 

3.
She is the changing needs of exploitation by capital.

 

Women buy things

 

because that’s the only proof that they exist.

 

Attack

 

Head-shaking liberals and (wageless) cushion of familial antagonism – that private ownership must of necessity develop into the expropriation of the (non)workers, and a (militant) refusal to accept the definition.
Anatomy transcends autonomy transcends anatomy.
Well-fed bodies and bougie signs of a diabolical insurgence have been co-opted. And trepidation has been spilt into by signs of imitation, where the seemingly unlimited supply of free-labour has been defined without hesitation.
This passivity

 

I’d much rather kick in the eye.

 

in love
to consume a bitter
silent ineptitude a body like a factory
but these tears
is unusually as newsworthy as plans to make me blue violence at the hands
of the street corner just about to lose my mind to be construed as
a good kid
as disposable as not much longer will you be of tension
counter- unrest paramilitary or
ain’t s’posed to cry is that bad like a cop
thrust upon
heavy-hand holding pulverised just about to
lose.

 

losing you
vigilante more
for your money day-in day
of an entire community will dissolve
unarmed camels
losing you for racially-charged
media narrative
we used to have to hear both sides
in its naked disregard
and petty made poverty
be making your enemy
always intersects with bodies
now there’s nothing left of me
is actually in cold blood
and the memory coded
don’t know why I fight it
trucks carry conclusions
I’ll give you the rest of me
punitive in nature
expendable verbatim
built into procedure
lest we riot
can’t lose you from my.

 

light
if the sky that we look upon
simulates drowning
or mulls over air
strikes
should crumble and multiple barrel bomb
shell nation could sooner
die
or the mountains shot fleeing fleeting civilian or blip
should tumble
to the will of drones
no I won’t shed a
tear gas or shot with rubber
rubble or cease fire is already exhausted..

 

love crops up
leaky coalition forces
get over it is cultural apropos
will get you like a case of oil shock
caught in the crossfires under preventive strikes or quarantine
something of an
economic revitalization media shower
and I feel like a
workers under confinement of the village
militant
is something I don’t want to catch my head’s not empty it’s
already lost its status as an interlocutor
and I feel like a strategic
objective missiles
“they can’t un-
turn your camera off, did you?”
only yesterday I said to myself
war by any other means would smell as sweet.

 

Like a kiss
drop the oil money motives
to be strengthened
detain and monitor with all the tenderness
who shot caught on tape
calmly down the hall
“I put him down”
and it felt like captured on tape, too
and not about race
up the stairs and I knew
in slow
or dragging on video
or with a gun
or para-police state
or standard of evidence
or targeted security
or detailed account
or heroic action
or “radicalised”
or racialised
or when he kissed me
or grabbed his side arm
or a semi-automatic
or multiple times and fell
or bullet holes through the door
or hitting the floor
or gripped the nation
or pre-empt arrests
or I assure you, Mr. Speaker

 

fragmenting procedures of carnage and corruption dead set for crossed out knocked down erasure with bullet holes opened fire on semi-pulverised bricks and stone breeds reaction incarcerate assault hemorrhage in bleeding
and I knew he loved me.

 

state of nature
quench that frantic
nestled in flailing
open up a sock in it
capital wants what you want
is she mystified labour
verbal evacuation
over-simplify or reciprocal
self-induced value
want you to
structure this mess so lonely to be
nestled in
civil society
contractual
in nature
capital wants a shoot and kill democracy
quench that disposession
vacuous evaluation
dispersed carnage
so lonely without
heavy weaponry
capital wants you to want
open up complicit
so lonely.

 

bad timing
ditch the
dash-cam to make me
feel
dead set on a machine
trap
the words I’m saying will not
can not breathe to be tamed
or smothered in this is
a trap
machine is memory
insofar as
you are what you breathe
cassette or cigarette or
choke hold on hold
music goes on
forever
refusal to speak is
louder than is spoken
we get
caught up bound up buried in
the letters that overt
the colour in
when someone said I gotta know
if it bleeds
get down and
make suture in
silence is sadness is molecules
is torture is waiting
is his sometimes hers
ugh
is rage without words
how do we to know this is
for real

 

upon a meeting
eloquence as though
thought
unknowable
is this (in negative) a shimmer
slimmer sliver of
when death is called for or
debt is
trepidation a future uncalled for
we ask and get nothing singing in a strange land is difficult
to transcend
and our capitalist excursions are built to this to scale: parasite
to paradise concrete buffet
or plebiscite uptown or down time
or when my conscious
word to chaperone is sped up
or slow down
to too much of this is whither agony? wait to
this heat or beat
to drop.

close this panel
Friendly + Fire

Friendly + Fire

by Danielle LaFrance
edition:Paperback
tagged : canadian

Act I of LaFrance’s first book, Species Branding, ends with the line: “crippled on my last leg. where are our friends?” It is a question that led to Friendly + Fire (Talonbooks 2016), where LaFrance takes aim at friendship as such.

The Tarnak Farm Incident, where four Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan were killed by American Air Force pilot Harry Schmidt, is used as source material to navigate and build a discourse of friendship in the 21st century. From this case study, Friendly + Fire int …

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In a Blue Moon

In a Blue Moon

by Lucia Frangione
edition:Paperback
tagged : canadian

When Frankie’s dad dies, her mom, Ava, can’t afford to live in the city anymore. The only asset they’re left with is a farmhouse situated on twenty acres of land far outside of town. Ava decides to move there and start an Ayurveda clinic on the property, giving her precocious and grieving daughter a new start. One problem presents itself, though: a squatter who won’t leave.

 

Will, professional photographer, long-estranged brother-in-law to Ava, and uncle to Frankie, lives rent-free on th …

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The Corpse with the Ruby Lips

The Corpse with the Ruby Lips

by Cathy Ace
edition:eBook
also available: Paperback
tagged : women sleuths

A new book from Bony Blithe award–winning mystery author Cathy Ace where her sleuth Cait Morgan investigates a chilling cold case from a university in Budapest.

A gig as guest lecturer at the university in Budapest should have been a dream job for a travelling criminologist and food lover. But wherever Cait Morgan goes, murder seems to follow. One of Cait’s new students pleads with her to solve the mystery of her grandmother’s brutal slaying. She agrees, but when she is repeatedly hassled b …

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A Killer in King's Cove

A Killer in King's Cove

A Lane Winslow Mystery
by Iona Whishaw
edition:Paperback
tagged : women sleuths, historical

A smart and enchanting postwar mystery that will appeal to fans of the Maisie Dobbs series by Jacqueline Winspear.

It is 1946, and war-weary young ex-intelligence officer Lane Winslow leaves London to look for a fresh start. When she finds herself happily settled into a sleepy hamlet in the interior of British Columbia surrounded by a suitably eclectic cast of small-town characters she feels like she may finally be able to put her past to rest.

But then a body is discovered, the victim of murder, …

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A Killer in King's Cove

A Killer in King's Cove

by Iona Whishaw
edition:eBook
tagged : women sleuths, historical

A smart and enchanting postwar mystery that will appeal to fans of the Maisie Dobbs series by Jacqueline Winspear.

It is 1946, and war-weary young ex-intelligence officer Lane Winslow leaves London to look for a fresh start. When she finds herself happily settled into a sleepy hamlet in the interior of British Columbia surrounded by a suitably eclectic cast of small-town characters she feels like she may finally be able to put her past to rest.

But then a body is discovered, the victim of murder, …

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The Bone Collector's Son

The Bone Collector's Son

by Paul Yee
edition:Paperback
also available: eBook
tagged : paranormal, parents

Fourteen-year-old Bing is upset with his father for forcing him to help him dig up the bones of Chinese men and women in order to send them back to China. After they discover a skeleton without a skull, Ba is haunted by the powerful ghost. Later Bing gets a job as houseboy for a wealthy family, where he finds another ghost haunting the family. Bing is finally able to find out what both ghosts want from the living and rescues his father from impending death.

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