Alison Calder

Award-winning poet Alison Calder attempts to map the brain's neural connections, raising fundamental questions about identity and interiority. Juxtaposed against the scientific-like footnotes, these poems ask us to think about the way we perceive--and the ways in which we seek to know ourselves and others.

Synaptic

Alison Calder’s poetry is known for shining the light of the poet’s curiosity on all manner of “natural occurrences,” which nevertheless stand out. Again, as with her first book, Wolf Tree, this collection is about what exists at the edges of human experience, what’s out there but is largely unseen by the average human being – animals, the line a receiver makes running down a football field, the calligraphy of pheasant wings in the snow. It’s about ghosts, how things operate as ghosts to us now, in this age – things that might have, in another age, occupied a more central place in our lives.

In the Tiger Park

Robert Wardhaugh

The Canadian Prairie has long been represented as a timeless and unchanging location, defined by settlement and landscape. Now, a new generation of writers and historians challenge that perception and argue, instead, that it is a region with an evolving culture and history. This collection of ten essays explores a more contemporary prairie identity, and reconfigures "the prairie" as a construct that is non-linear and diverse, responding to the impact of geographical, historical, and political currents. These writers explore the connections between document and imagination, between history and culture, and between geography and time.The subjects of the essays range widely: the non-linear structure of Carol Shield's The Stone Diaries; the impact of Aberhart's Social Credit, Marshall McLuhan, and Mesopotamian myth on Robert Kroetsch's prairie postmodernism; the role of document in long prairie poems; the connection between cultural tourism and heritage; the theme of regeneration in Margaret Laurence's Manawaka writing; the influence of imagination on geography in Thomas Wharton's Icefields; and the effects on an alpine climber of pre-WWII ideological concepts of time and individualism.

Alison Calder

Books

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