Miskwagoode

Miskwagoode PDF Author: Annharte
Publisher: New Star Books
ISBN: 9781554201846
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 80

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Book Description
Taken from the Anishinaabe word for woman, MISKWAGOODE is a lyrical portrayal of unreconciled Indigenous experience under colonialism, past and present. Miskwagoode, the woman in the red dress, is Annharte, and she is Annharte's mother, who disappeared when the poet was a girl.Miskwagoodeis Annharte's new book about her mother loss, her mothermiss, about all the women buried in common enough / cross-generational graves. Marked with her characteristic sharp eye and humour, and hard earned wisdom about the ominous progress ahead, Annharte's fifth collection encompasses the poet's experiences as an Anishinaabe Elder, witness not survivor, writing of the weight of a present and persisting colonialism. In her sly, cheeky riffs on life behind the buckskin curtain at the margins of settler society, Annharte tells us about granny circles, the horny old guys, and getting your hair done. But these poems about rez life and the community and belonging it offers are set against the background radiation of the poverty and the sicknesses, despair, violence, sexism, and sexual abuse, the legacies of unequal relations. Miskwagoodeconcludes with Wabang, a suite of short poems comprising Annharte's own thumbnail transcontinental Indigenous mythology. Poetry. Native American Studies. Women's Studies.

Miskwagoode

Miskwagoode PDF Author: Annharte
Publisher: New Star Books
ISBN: 9781554201846
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 80

Get Book Here

Book Description
Taken from the Anishinaabe word for woman, MISKWAGOODE is a lyrical portrayal of unreconciled Indigenous experience under colonialism, past and present. Miskwagoode, the woman in the red dress, is Annharte, and she is Annharte's mother, who disappeared when the poet was a girl.Miskwagoodeis Annharte's new book about her mother loss, her mothermiss, about all the women buried in common enough / cross-generational graves. Marked with her characteristic sharp eye and humour, and hard earned wisdom about the ominous progress ahead, Annharte's fifth collection encompasses the poet's experiences as an Anishinaabe Elder, witness not survivor, writing of the weight of a present and persisting colonialism. In her sly, cheeky riffs on life behind the buckskin curtain at the margins of settler society, Annharte tells us about granny circles, the horny old guys, and getting your hair done. But these poems about rez life and the community and belonging it offers are set against the background radiation of the poverty and the sicknesses, despair, violence, sexism, and sexual abuse, the legacies of unequal relations. Miskwagoodeconcludes with Wabang, a suite of short poems comprising Annharte's own thumbnail transcontinental Indigenous mythology. Poetry. Native American Studies. Women's Studies.

Writing Class

Writing Class PDF Author: Michael Barnholden
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
Since the mid 1980s, the Kootenay School of Writing, a writer-run center in Vancouver, has been the site of some of the most innovative poetry coming out of North America. Leaving behind conventional ideas about syntax and lyricism, the KSW poets have produced a body of work that is jarring, troubling, provocative, funny, and beautiful. In their introduction to this sampling from the work of fourteen writers, Andrew Klobucar and Michael Barnholden describe the historical and aesthetic environment which produced the Kootenay School of Writing, and in doing so demystify a poetry that many regard as "difficult." WRITING CLASS is a fascinating introduction to the most vital poetry being written today.

Indigena Awry

Indigena Awry PDF Author: Annharte
Publisher: New Star Books
ISBN: 1554200679
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 137

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Book Description
NDN word warrior Marie Annharte Baker's fourth book of poems, Indigena Awry, is her largest and wildest yet. It collects a decade's worth of verse — fifty-nine poems. Set noticeably in Winnipeg and Vancouver, but in many other places on either side of the Medicine Line as well, the poems are a laser-eyed meander through contested streets filled with racism, classism, and sexism. Shot through with sex and violence and struggle and sadness and trauma, her work is always set to detect and confront the delusions of colonialism and its discontents. These poems are informed by a sceptical spirituality. They call for justice for NDNs through the Permanent Resistance that goes around in cities. This is bruising and exacting stuff, but Annharte is also one of poetry's best jokers. In Indigena Awry, you can find fictitious girl gangs coexisting with real boy ones. NDN grannies may be found flirting salaciously in some internet chat room. One might use duct tape to prevent a war. You might be worried that hand-signalling for a Timbit on an airplane flight will be considered a terrorist act. Annharte may be seam-walking a singular path but she is not without allies. In the United States, they could include Leslie Marmon Silko and Chrystos. In Canada, Beth Brant and Gerry Gilbert. The jazz inflections of Beat writing are often apparent in her work. She swings from a poetic madness into a mad poetics. Way under it all, acting as a deep sort of platform, could be considered the Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong'o's project of decolonizing one's mind. Both sketch out an argument that we will not see, feel, or respond correctly in or to our own lives without doing this, because otherwise we will be living within a philosophical myopia generated by a bad fiction. While Indigena Awry is written for NDN persons, it is highly recommended for truth-seekers of every nature and anarchs of word and spirit. In an Annharte poem you might lose your way only to find what's important.

A Voice Great Within Us

A Voice Great Within Us PDF Author: Charles Lillard
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 128

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Book Description
Skookum, cultus, hyack, saltchuck, klahowya, tillicum: It is in words like these that the last vestiges of a lost British Columbian language remain. It was known as Chinook. Its use today is mainly confined to colloquialisms, and place names like Boston Bar, Canim Lake, Illahee Mountain, Snass Creek, and Skookumchuck. It began as a trading jargon, but it soon evolved into a distinct West Coast tongue. Down through the years, as many as a quarter of a million people relied on it. Chinook was an everyday necessity.A Voice Great Within Us consists of an introductory essay by Glavin exploring the development and spread of Chinook throughout the West Coast, and the place it continues to have in our history; the Chinook poem, Rain Language; Lillard's own essay on the part that Chinook played in his own life and exploration of British Columbia. In addition, A Voice Great Within Us includes a lexicon containing hundreds of Chinook words and expressions and a map and gazetteer of British Columbia, showing eighty Chinook place names in this province.A Voice Great Within Us is Number 7 in the Transmontanus series of books edited by Terry Glavin.

Burning Water

Burning Water PDF Author: George Bowering
Publisher: New Star Books
ISBN: 1554200792
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 227

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Book Description
First published in 1980 to high acclaim, Burning Water won a Governor General's Award for fiction that year. A rollicking chronicle of Captain Vancouver's search for the Northwest Passage, the book has over its career been mentioned in recommended lists of postmodern fiction, BC historical fiction, gay fiction and humour. This gives you some idea of the scope of what has been called Bowering's best novel. "I have sometimes said, kidding but not really kidding," writes its author, "that I attended to the spirit of the west coast, and told the story about the rivals for our land as an instance in which the commanders decided to make love, not war." As an accurate account of Vancouver's exploration of our coastline, Burning Water conveys the exact length  99 feet  of the explorer's ship, and contains citations from his journals. As a work of fanciful fiction, things usually thought to be impossible transpire, without compromising the realism of the text. Bowering recalls that his free hand with history particularly incensed the founder of the National Archives, who had written a biography of George Vancouver and complained in print that Burning Water differed too much from other, similar books in its field.

Exercises in Lip Pointing

Exercises in Lip Pointing PDF Author: Marie Annharte Baker
Publisher: Transmontanus
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 100

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Book Description
"Exercises in Lip Pointing is a new collection of poems by respected First Nations writer Annharte. She uses oral sounds and written signs to probe and prod the reader, to ask the right questions, to lay bare the contradictions and delights in the serendipities of her experience. She makes us laugh, cry, and learn."--Publisher.

Gardens Aflame

Gardens Aflame PDF Author: Maleea Acker
Publisher: New Star Books
ISBN: 1554200652
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 109

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Book Description
Accustomed to the dark, dripping stands of Douglas–fir, spruce and hemlock that blanketed the Hudson's Bay Company outposts on the remote western coast of the "new World" the first Europeans were surely startled to see the wide–open landscapes of the Garry oak meadows they encountered on Southern Vancouver Island ––– landscapes that might have reminded any explorers who had ventured into the African savannahs of what they had seen there. Though slow in comprehending what they had stumbled upon, the Europeans immediately recognized the deep, rich deposits of black soil that extended many feet below the surface, and James Douglas chose the site as the ideal location for the HBC's new fort, and settlement. What the newcomers failed to appreciate is that these meadows were not the work of nature alone, but of the Coast Salish peoples who had been living in these parts for millennia. With the construction of the fort of Victoria began an encroachment on these Garry oak meadows, built up over centuries if not millennia, a process that continues today. In Gardens Aflame, Victoria writer and environmentalist Maleea Acker tells us about this unique and vanishing ecosystem, and the people who have made it their life's work to save the Garry oak and the environment ––– including the human environment ––– it depends on. Acker tells us about the Garry oak species and its unique habits and requirements, including its unusual summer dormancy period, when all the surrounding plants are coursing with life. We learn something about the scientists, arborists, and Garry oak–loving volunteers who have dedicated themselves to this tree; and about Theophrastus, Humboldt, and their other forebearers who are still reshaping our notions of nature and humans' place in it. And in the course of Acker's story, we see her fall under the spell of the strange beauty woven by these magnificent trees, and the ecosystems they tower over ––– until, in the final act, she decides to turn her own front yard into her own version of a Garry oak meadow, defying City Hall and the neighbours, and bringing to a head in 2011 all the issues raised 150 years ago when Europeans first saw the open meadows of Southern Vancouver Island. Gardens Aflame is number 21 in the Transmontanus series.

What Species of Creatures

What Species of Creatures PDF Author: Sharon Kirsch
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
Literary Nonfiction. North American History. Science. Three centuries ago, white Europeans began to colonize the North American continent. In doing so, they encountered flying squirrels, ruby-throated hummingbirds, and the easily tamed beaver: creatures their kind had never met before. The accounts of early explorers and settlers in describing these animals and others provide fascinating insight into the taxonomies they carried to the so-called New World. Their literature of discovery was by turns comic, cruel and adulatory. This book brings together period quotes and 21st-century science in an idiosyncratic narrative. Extended anecdote conveys the adventures of historical personalities, and the book borrows, too, from fables, children's stories and natural histories. Yet WHAT SPECIES OF CREATURES addresses present concerns our habitual understanding of wild animals and our own place in the natural order. In the process of quoting from and commenting upon European ancestors' speciesist arrogance, Kirsch interrogates our seemingly insatiable appetite to trap, catch, skin, domesticate, eat, eradicate or otherwise bend to our use the animals in our midst."

Words, Words, Words

Words, Words, Words PDF Author: George Bowering
Publisher: New Star Books
ISBN: 1554200660
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
Words, Words, Words is a wide–ranging collection of literary essays that astonish the reader with their candor, insight, and generosity. Many of them reveal the absurdity that so often underlies our most passionate thoughts, our most cherished moments, even our most disturbing fears and recognitions. They echo everywhere with a kind of cosmic laughter that never lets us forget we are constructs of our own capacity to see through language — that at a most fundamental level, what we think about our selves is inevitably an extension of what we learn in our reading of others. Here we also get to find out what Bowering most cherishes about writers and writing: who Al Purdy was; what David McFadden's work pays attention to; when the world of poetry changed; where Artie Gold appeared as a light fixture in our darkness; how bpNichol's Martyrology legitimized the vernacular; why we cannot read history without encountering Shakespeare. Neither precious nor shy, their subjects range from the sublime to the ridiculous — from the inarticulate nature of grief to a modest proposal for the uses of the dead. Together, they constitute a history of the education of Canada's first Poet Laureate: from his adolescent dreams of becoming a writer; his early recognition of the discipline required to forge a life in language; the ongoing feud between the TISH authors and the self–appointed nationalist police; Bowering shares with us what he has learned in a lifetime of exercising his craft — even including what constitutes bad writing. Whether in deconstructing the cliches of genre fiction; the ghetto of identity politics; the hapless failure of any attempt to harness language to utilitarian purposes; the abuse of language required to write "sensitive" prose and verse; he constantly reminds us that the first and most important rule of life is: pay attention.

Enough Already

Enough Already PDF Author: Bruce O'Hara
Publisher: Transmontanus
ISBN: 9781554200108
Category : Self-actualization (Psychology) in middle age
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Most North Americans are overspent, overtired, overweight and overworked and believe that more money, more stuff, more time, more of everything will lead to more happiness. In this anti-retirement guide for the boomer generation, Bruce O'Hara dismisses this idea and offers seven keys to happiness in the second half of life. Instead of working too much now so you can stop entirely later, why not enjoy retirement's best benefits -- spare time and financial freedom -- immediately, while avoiding the ennui and loss of purpose that can cloud your golden years?O'Hara looks at research on the happiest and longest-lived seniors to understand how it is some people manage to live comparatively long, enjoyable, and useful lives. He peppers this engaging, lively and grounded call to arms with accounts of himself, his friends and neighbours to point out the kind of lives we could be leading - and why we don't.