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Category Archives for In Matrix 79
The Alphabet Game: a bpNichol reader
Edited by Darren Wershler-Henrey and Lori Emerson
Coach House Books, 2007
Read by Nick McArthur
Given the breadth and variety of his work, it’s frankly amazing a book like this exists. In a career spanning 27 years, Nichol composed novels, comics, songs, essays, drawings, stories, teleplays, pamphlets, and, most famously and most impressively, thousands of pages of concrete, [...]
Baby Remember My Name: An Anthology of New Queer Girl Writing
Carroll & Graff/Avalon Publishing
Edited by Michelle Tea
Read by Lateef Martin
Baby Remember My Name explores queer writing and experiences from the pens of 24 women. The variety of experiences and the distinct voice of each short story keeps things fresh. Stand outs include:
Ovenman by Jeff Parker
Tin House Press, 2007
Read by Mike Spry
In his debut novel, Ovenman, Jeff Parker has created a vivid and honest recollection of a world that exists in the periphery of even the strangest of sub-cultures. Set in early 1990s Central Florida, Ovenman is the story of When Thinfinger, a skateboarding, poorly tattooed anti-hero who falls from [...]
Anatomy of Keys by Steven Price
Brick Books, 2006
Read by Aaron Tucker
Within the Canadian poetic tradition there is an amazing history of the long poem, particularly ones like Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, which centers around the biography of a mercurial American icon. Steven Price’s Anatomy of Keys carries on in this tradition, weaving a masterfully dense and [...]
Long Story Short: a novella and stories by Elyse Friedman
House of Anansi Press, 2007
Read by Jenny Sampirisi
At the front of Long Story Short is Elyse Friedman’s tender, funny and emotional novella, “A Bright Tragic Thing.” In it a teen boy, amused by the fermented irony of 80s B-list actors, befriends a former sitcom star. What is striking about this story is its ability to [...]
The Girls Who Saw Everything by Sean Dixon
Coach House Books, 2007
Read by T.K. Murphy
Dumuzi is trying to have sex with Anna. Runner Cogshill is trying to have sex with Dumuzi. Runner likes Anna. Runner would like to be Anna. But Runner is not Anna. You could even say that Runner is the in-Anna. (Dumuzi is in Anna too, but just once. Talking [...]
The Notebook of Roses and Civilization by Nicole Brossard
Translated by Robert Mazjels, Erin Moure
Coach House Books, 2007
Read by Hermonie Xie
The romantic title lured me into picking this one up. It suggests the mingling of man and nature – and a notebook, a battered bundle of paper; provenance and tome of ideas that flit in and out of the mind like ecstatic hummingbirds. Before [...]
The Real Made Up by Stephen Brockwell
Misfit / ECW, 2007
Read by Jesse Patrick Ferguson
Ottawa poet Stephen Brockwell’s fourth collection, The Real Made Up, is formally diverse. Its split personalities lead it from conservative to avant-garde poetics: a free-ranging spirit that is uncommon in Canadian poetry. The roughly 100 pages of short and medium-length poems can be divided into four [...]
Obon: The Festival of the Dead by Terry Watada
Thistledown Press, 2006
Read by Jakub Stachurski
In Obon: The Festival of the Dead, Terry Watada evokes the eponymous Japanese-Buddhist holiday on an aural and physical plane. The lines are radically enjambed and the convention of the dropped line is often utilized. Punctuation is used sparsely, and this absence of commas and periods opens the poems to [...]