BC Poetry 2018: "Quarrels" by Eve Joseph (Anvil Press)

from Quarrels

THE CAPON EXPLODED OUT OF THE PRESSURE COOKER AND STUCK IN
the kitchen ceiling. It hung there like a black chandelier. People took turns trying to 
pull it out with no success. Its charred head poked out of the roof and acted as a 
weather vane. The wind polished it until it gleamed like a well-worn doorknob. We 
adjusted to the smell of burnt bones and set the table as usual. In the 9th Century, 
Pope Nicholas decreed that a cock had to top every church steeple in Europe. Our 
home was a holy place. We worshipped all that crawled. All that flew. 

Who?

Eve Joseph's two books of poetry, The Startled Heart (Oolichan, 2004) and The Secret Signature of Things (Brick, 2010) were both nominated for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. Her nonfiction book, In the Slender Margin was published by HarperCollins in 2014 and won the Hubert Evans Award for nonfiction and was named one of the top 100 picks of the year by the Globe and Mail.


What?

The acclaimed author of the memoir, In the Slender Margin, turns her focus back to poetry in this amazing and condensed work of prose poems.
The poems in Quarrels collection reach for something other than truth, the marvelous. Leaves fall out of coat sleeves, Gandhi swims in Burrard Inlet. The poems are like empty coats from which the inhabitants have recently escaped, leaving behind images as clues to their identity. There are leaps between logics within the poems, and it is in these illogical spaces where everything comes together, like the uplift of the conductor's hand to begin a piece of music where, as Arvo Part put it, the potential of the whole exists.


When?

Arrives May 7, 2018.


Where?

Launches:

May 15, 7:30 PM, Munro's Books: Victoria Book Launch, featuring Eve Joseph, Patrick Friesen and Bill Gaston.

Purchases:

Purchase from the All Lit Up website or at your local bookstore. $18.

How?

Reaching for something other than truth.

Anvil Press * About This Series * More Books, Please!

The copyrights of all poems included in the series remain with their authors, and are reprinted with the permission of the publishers.