Retail 2012: Brick Books

Reviewed by Jacob McArthur Mooney (Vox Populism, February 3, 2012)

Retail 2012: Brick Books

We begin our annual round-up with those good Londoners over at Brick Books. Brick is presided over by Kitty Lewis, the bon-bon giving, cheek-pinching, favourite aunty of Canadian poetry. It’s editorial input comes from a committee that has been active, in different incarnations, for many years now. The idea of an editorial committee making the decisions, instead of the singular voice of a poetry editor, has gone from eccentric to totally mainstream over the last year or so, as numerous other presses (Goose Lane, Coach House…) have done the same thing.

Four books in the poetry catalogue for Brick this spring. Here they are.

Title: Omens in the Year of the Ox
Author: Steven Price
Release Date: February...

Title: Monkey Ranch
Author: Julie Bruck
Release Date: March...

Title: Between Dusk and Night
Author: Emily McGiffin
Release Date: May
Collection Number: First
Editor-Approved Bumfspeak: “There are many journeys encompassed in the pages of this mature and well-crafted first collection; literal travels to different parts of the world, to Europe and Africa, are the outward manifestation of the inward quest, the asking of the old but still essential questions: What is real? What is true? What is honourable? What is right? Yet these questions are new in that the poet is deeply concerned with the need to find a new paradigm, a new way to relate to the earth at this time of ever-heightening environmental crisis. And this seeking for how to be in and of the earth is paralleled by a personal search for intimacy with her fellow humans—with friends and lovers, with a grandfather, with the people she encounters as she ventures into uneasy relationships with people from other cultures.”
Google Says: McGiffin won the 2009 Bronwen Wallace Award over two other poets (Michael Johnson and Jeff Latosik) that are pretty great themselves. I’ll link to a story about it here, by awesomely-professional Globe and Mail employee, Judith Fitzgerald, written in a departure from her usual Proustian diction and style. I’m 90% confident the poet is the same person who wrote this letter to The Walrus in support of Vancouver Island’s forests (scroll down a bit, it’s at the end). As for the book, itself, I’m excited for it. You can read the citation and whatnot from the Writers’ Trust on their website, and there’s an actual poem from the poet up here on the Globe.

Title: I see my love more clearly from a distance
Author: Nora Gould
Release Date: April...

That was fun. Let’s do another press very soon.

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