- Anatomy of Keys
- Steven Price
- 1894078519
- 9781894078511
- 144
- 2006
- 5.5" × 8.75"
- $18.00
to buy with PayPal or a Credit Card
Cover art:
Design by Kevin Price
Listen to Poems from Anatomy of Keys
Winner of the 2007 Gerald Lampert Award, shortlisted for the Dorothy Livesay Award for Poetry (BC Book Prizes) and longlisted for the 2007 ReLit Awards. Globe 100 book for 2006.
A tour de force, a book-length poem, embracing a wide variety of poetic and prose forms, to tell the story of Harry Houdini.
Steven Price's Houdini knows better than most the limitations of life, having bent the efforts of a lifetime to transcending them, and having failed. Ah, but his thinking! Or rather Steven Price's thinking with and through him. "Make it muscular and be apparent in it," says Houdini's archivist/advisor, "words are also escapes." So they are in a book with the sinew of Anatomy of Keys. The facts of Houdini's life are here - immigration to America, youth, circus stint, fame, that notorious life-ending punch - but the facts are the spine of a deep and ardent meditation on what is. In poems of astonishing technical virtuosity, Steven Price reads Houdini's world and our own in compellingly original ways.
Swivel-and-snick sputter of a turned handle.
Bald knob bare in the palm. The torpid click
And calm take of springs triggered far within.
I'd set myself to hear it clear again,
That ordinary hinge and creak and drag
Of doors we live with all our days and lose
The wonder of.
From "XLIV.iv"
"Steven Price, in his Anatomy of Keys, draws us into the intricacy of Harry Houdini's character, as the Master himself entered trunks, chains, a web of knots. In poem after poem, there is the miraculous surprise of release. These are moving, brilliant poems, a remarkable debut." - Tim Lilburn
Third printing
Ten Questions, with Steven Price - on Open Book: Toronto – Steven talks about his first novel Into That Darkness , April 2011
Review of Into That Darkness by Steven Price – National Post, April 22, 2011 – review by Robert Wiersema
“Into That Darkness is many things: a novel of survival, a collection of post-apocalyptic quests, an account of loss in its myriad forms, and of hope at its most vital and true. It’s a fundamentally human work that draws deep into the soul and the spirit. It is also that rarest of books, a literary novel with the narrative momentum of genre or commercial writing. It is, above all, compelling and real, a novel that will satisfy at every level.”
More Brick Books by Steven Price
- Omens in the Year of the Ox (2012)
Reviews
- Rookies kicking up their heels by Barbara Carey (The Toronto Star, September 10, 2006)
- Anatomy of Keys by Steven Price by Michael Claxton (Magic: the magazine for magicians, September 2006)
- Stacked Vowels and Clustered Consonants by Patrick Warner (Books in Canada - December 2006)
- Houdini epic is pure magic by Patrick Watson (Globe and Mail, June 23rd, 2006)
- The Great Escape by Eye Weekly (Eye Weekly, July 6, 2006, Volume 15, Issue 40)
- The Inner Workings of the Lock by Aaron Tucker (www.agorareview.ca, October 9, 2008)
- Anatomy of Keys by Sina Queyras (Lemon Hound blogspot - October 4, 2007)
- Serious and Frivolous by Bert Almon (Canadian Literature 196 - spring 2008)
- Anatomy of Keys by Steven Price by Jan Horner (Prairie Fire, July 2009)
- The Architecture of Persona: Steven Price Writes Houdini by Carlin M. Wragg (Open Loop Press, July / August 2009)
- "Sinew of Fire and Flint:" Lise Gaston on Steven Price's "Anatomy of Keys". by Lise Gaston (Lemonhound blogspot, April 18, 2011)
- Anatomy of Keys by Steven Price by Heidi Greco (subTerrain Vol. 5.45 (2007))
- Anatomy of Keys by Steven Price by David Hickey (Northern Poetry Reviews, 2006)
