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Created by ABPBC on February 12, 2016
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Poetry books from BC.
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.

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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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Once in Blockadia

Once in Blockadia

by Stephen Collis
edition:Paperback
tagged : canadian

In this collection of long and serial poems, Stephen Collis returns to the commons, and to his ongoing argument with romantic poet William Wordsworth, to rethink the relationship between human beings and the natural world in the Anthropocene. Collis circumambulates Tar Sands tailings ponds and English lakes—and stands in the path of pipelines, where on Burnaby Mountain in 2014 he was sued for $5.6 million dollars by energy giant Kinder Morgan, whose lawyers glossed Collis’s writing in court …

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Reading Sveva

Reading Sveva

by Daphne Marlatt
edition:Paperback
tagged : canadian

Reading Sveva is award-winning author Daphne Marlatt’s response to the life and paintings of Sveva Caetani, an Italian émigré who grew up in Vernon, B.C.

Daughter of an Italian prince, leftist, and scholar of Islam, Sveva grew up with the multilingual and highly cultured European traditions of her parents who moved to Vernon in 1921, when Fascism was on the rise in Italy. At age eighteen, after her father’s death in 1939, Sveva was forced into home-seclusion for twenty-five years with her …

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Scree

Scree

The Collected Earlier Poems, 1962–1991
by Fred Wah, introduction by Jeff Derksen
edition:Paperback
also available: Hardcover
tagged : canadian

Fred Wah’s career has spanned six decades and a range of formal styles and preoccupations. Scree collects Wah’s concrete and sound poetry of the 1960s, his landscape-centric work of the 1970s, and his ethnicity-oriented poems of the 1980s. Fred was a founding member of the avant-garde TISH group, which helped turn Canadian poetry, in the West in particular, to a focus on language. He has said that his “writing has been sustained, primarily, by two interests: racial hybridity and the local. …

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Scree

Scree

The Collected Earlier Poems, 1962–1991
by Fred Wah, introduction by Jeff Derksen
edition:Hardcover
also available: Paperback
tagged : canadian

Fred Wah’s career has spanned six decades and a range of formal styles and preoccupations. Scree collects Wah’s concrete and sound poetry of the 1960s, his landscape-centric work of the 1970s, and his ethnicity-oriented poems of the 1980s. Fred was a founding member of the avant-garde TISH group, which helped turn Canadian poetry, in the West in particular, to a focus on language. He has said that his “writing has been sustained, primarily, by two interests: racial hybridity and the local. …

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Boobs

Boobs

Women Explore What It Means to Have Breasts
edited by Ruth Daniell
edition:Paperback
also available: eBook
tagged : women authors

At turns heartbreaking and hilarious, BOOBS is a diverse collection of stories about the burdens, expectations and pleasures of having breasts. From the agony of puberty and angst of adolescence to the anxiety of aging, these stories and poems go beyond the usual images of breasts found in fashion magazines and movie posters, instead offering dynamic and honest portraits of desire, acceptance and the desire for acceptance.

Surrounded by flat-chested co-workers in a male-dominated construction cr …

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The Dirty Knees of Prayer

The Dirty Knees of Prayer

by Timothy Shay
edition:Paperback
tagged : canadian

The poems in The Dirty Knees of Prayer are hot and dark as night rain. The new Honeywell fan blows whips of simmered air against Shay's glistening back. He suspects a dystopian future and apparently it has arrived. These poems shrug at death. A tide of smoke rises and hovers over the city. Shay's picture is taken for his collection of grief and apocalyptic love. These poems speak of sadness and self-fated things, how the heat blurs everything, the clouds send shrouds of water down. Here a thin g …

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