Want to diversify your reading list? Do you like supporting local businesses? Maybe you’ve discovered a new interest in poetry in these self-reflective times? Check out the fall lineup from Guelph literary publisher Gordon Hill Press.
You can get these books as e-books for $10, or in paperback for $20-$22 each, or a bundle of all three for $50 at gordonhillpress.com.
Saturn Peach by Lily Wang
In Saturn Peach, Lily Wang establishes a distinctive voice that is part heartbreak and part wise witness chronicling the strangeness of a technologized world. The book is featured on CBC’s list of Canadian poetry collections to watch this fall. When asked to describe her book, Wang answered in her quintessential way: “There are things I never want to know but always know. Every day I live with them. Every day I live. I am like a young fruit. Like a peach, common, not the popular kind but oblate, saturn. I live and inside me this pale fruit, yellow and white. I take bites out of myself and share them with you. Maybe you taste like me. Maybe you hold this fruit and become a tree.” If ever there were a book that disarmingly – and seemingly effortlessly – encouraged its reader to become a metaphor, then Saturn Peach is it.
Lily Wang is the founder and editor of Half a Grapefruit Magazine. She is doing her MA in English and Creative Writing at the University of Toronto.
In|Appropriate, edited by Kim Davids Mandar
In|Appropriate is a collection of interviews with Canadian authors, exploring how they work through questions of difference, identity, and appropriation in their writing. The interviews address questions of appropriation that go beyond race and culture, extending also to gender, sexuality, ability, age, and other categories of difference. They ask how writers work to represent an increasingly diverse and complex culture in ways that avoid falling into appropriation.
Edited by Kim Davids Mandar, and introduced by Daniel Heath Justice, the collection features interviews with Ian Williams, Ayelet Tsabari, Sanchari Sur, Eden Robinson, Jael Richardson, Waubgeshig Rice, Amanda Leduc, Chelene Knight, Mahak Jain, Wayne Grady, Alicia Elliott, Farzana Doctor, Michael Crummey, Arif Anwar, and Angie Abdou.
Kim Davids Mandar is an MSc student at University of Guelph, writing a thesis on the role of theatre in building intercultural sensitivity. Kim also co-hosts Bookish Radio at CFRU 93.3 FM.
Keeping Count by M. Travis Lane
- M. Travis Lane’s 19th collection of poetry, Keeping Count, begins in the poet’s favourite terrain: short, condensed lyric that focuses on the natural world. “But pull a thread: music turns” Lane writes, and the book progressively defamiliarizes the reader, moving from ecopoetry to a longer poetry of interiority in the second section, concluding with a final section that focuses on issues of mortality.
As George Elliott Clarke wrote, “If you have not read Lane before, prepare to travel: Like T.S. Eliot, she wants you to have a transporting experience in your imagination. If you have read Lane before, prepare for fresh astonishment. She is Homeric breadth and Sapphic brevity.”
- M. Travis Lane is one of Canada’s most distinguished writers. She has published 19 books of poetry and two of prose. She has received numerous awards for her writing and was short-listed for the Governor General’s Award for Poetry in 2015. She is a member of the Voice of Women for Peace and a Raging Granny. She lives in Fredericton, New Brunswick.
