Odes & Laments

Publisher: Caitlin Press Inc.

Through poems that celebrate the overlooked beauty in the everyday or that mourn human incursions upon the natural world, Fiona Tinwei Lam weaves polythematic threads into a shimmering tapestry that reveals the complexities of being human in an environment under threat. Inspired by Pablo Neruda’s Elemental Odes, this wide-ranging and diverse collection plays with the yin and yang of everyday existence, employing lyricism, narrative, humour and an occasional dash of irreverence and fun through visual play with text and typography.

About Fiona Tinwei Lam

Fiona Tinwei Lam has authored two poetry books, Intimate Distances (finalist for the City of Vancouver Book Award) and Enter the Chrysanthemum and a children's book, The Rainbow Rocket. She co-edited Double Lives: Writing and Motherhood (McGill-Queen's University Press), and edited The Bright Well: Contemporary Canadian Poems About Facing Cancer. Her poetry and prose appear in over 30 anthologies. Her poems have appeared twice on BC buses through the Poetry in Transit program, and her video poems have been screened locally and internationally. She has an MFA in creative writing from UBC, as well as a BA (UBC) and LLB (Queen’s) and LLM (University of Toronto). She is currently is a teacher/mentor at SFU Continuing Studies. fionalam.net




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Binding EAN ISBN-10 Pub Date PAGES Language Size Price
Paperback 9781773860152 1773860151 2019-12-20 72 0.00 x 5.50 x 8.00 in $18.00

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Odes & Laments

Odes & Laments

by Lam, Fiona Tinwei

Through poems that celebrate the overlooked beauty in the everyday or that mourn human incursions upon the natural world, Fiona Tinwei Lam weaves polythematic threads into a shimmering tapestry that reveals the complexities of being human in an environment under threat...

read more
On/Me

On/Me

by Cunningham, Francine

Francine Cunningham lives with constant reminders that she doesn’t fit the desired expectations of the world: she is a white-passing, city-raised Indigenous woman with mental illness, who has lost her mother. In her debut poetry collection On/Me, Cunningham explores, with keen attention and poise, what it means to be forced to exist within the margins...

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Rising Tides: Reflections for Climate Changing Times

Rising Tides: Reflections for Climate Changing Times

by Sandilands, Catriona

Ice melt; sea level rise; catastrophic weather; flooding; drought; fire; infestation; species extinction and adaptation; water shortage and contamination; intensified social inequity, migration and cultural collapse. These are but some of the changes that are not only predicted for climate changing futures, but already part of our lives in Canada...

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The Brightest Thing

The Brightest Thing

by Daniell, Ruth

In her first full-length collection, award-winning poet Ruth Daniell offers work that is both earnest and hopeful, even in the face of trauma. In formally exquisite and lyrical poems, The Brightest Thing tells the story of a young woman who is raped by her first boyfriend and her struggle afterwards to navigate her fairy-tale expectations of romantic love...

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Chenille or Silk

Chenille or Silk

by McKenna, Emma

Chenille or Silk is a startling first collection of confessional poetry examining the slippery relations of desire, class, embodiment and trauma. Emma McKenna’s writing traverses the bounds and the wounds of a family marked by poverty and intergenerational trauma...

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How She Read

How She Read

by Gibson, Chantal

How She Read is a collection of genre-blurring poems about the representation of Black women, their hearts, minds and bodies, across the Canadian cultural imagination...

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Paradise, Later Years

Paradise, Later Years

by Quednau, Marion

Marion Quednau’s collection Paradise, Later Years plays with the language of juxtaposition, nothing is straight on; if there’s quiet beauty by the sea, there’s a passing warship. Quednau’s lyricism, whether of river or lover, bears witness to relationships transformed by the tension—and surprise—of setting one thing against another...

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The Small Way

The Small Way

by Yawnghwe, Onjana

What strange gravity draws two people together? What pulls them apart? In The Small Way, a woman re-evaluates herself and her marriage as she comes to terms with a spouse’s transition. Intimate and powerful, the poems celebrate the courage of a partner coming out as a trans woman and records the confusion in facing a partner's changing gender identity...

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Playing into Silence

Playing into Silence

by Biello, Tina

Growing up during the 50s and 60s in small town Alberta, Pam was keenly aware, by the age of nine, that she was a lesbian. And she also knew well to hide this about herself. Pam would search for books on the "The Island of Lesbos", only to return from the library with a copy of Little Women...

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Elemental

Elemental

by Braid, Kate

Usually, we take for granted or plain ignore the Earth we walk on, the Sky above, the Water we drink and bathe in or that falls as rain, the Fire we assume for heat, and the Wood that makes up our landscape and building materials. But over fifteen years as a construction carpenter, Kate Braid began to pay more attention to the materials she worked with and depended upon...

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All Violet

All Violet

by Rivera, Rani

In All Violet, a young woman chronicles the experience of living on the margins, in spaces and places where body and mind are flayed by guilt, disappointments and betrayals...

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Flightpaths

Flightpaths

by Greco, Heidi

On the 120th anniversary of Amelia Earhart’s birth and the 80th anniversary of her disappearance, award-winning poet, Heidi Greco revitalizes what we know about the iconic aviator through uplifting and historically mesmerizing verse...

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Refugium

Refugium

by

New poetry written by prize-winning BC poets, musicians, and artists, anthologized by Victoria's city poet-laureate. While in the world of politics there are still climate change deniers, the poets watch the warming seas, the dying birds slicked in oil, the whales, the jellies, the sea otters and the octopus. They stand, as close to the shore as possible, watch the slow turning tide...

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Acquired Community

Acquired Community

by Byers, Jane

Jane Byers’ Acquired Community is both a collection of narrative poems about seminal moments in North American lesbian and gay history, mostly post-World War II, and a series of first person poems that act as a touchstone to compare the narrator’s coming out experience within the larger context of the gay liberation movement...

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Eating Matters

Eating Matters

by Macdonald, Kara-lee

Kara-lee MacDonald is a survivor. The poems in Eating Matters are sophisticated explorations of anorexia and bulimia, from within and in retrospect, as the semiautobiographical narrator faces and overcomes her complex drives and compulsions...

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Your Good Hat

Your Good Hat

by Munk, Barbara

In this twenty-year retrospective of Barbara Munk's work, she pays close attention to the world around her: the man who rustles through garbage cans and dumpsters for his food, the undertaker who wants his ashes spread outside the Elks hall, a robin outside the window. And she invites the reader to look at the world in new ways...

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Walk Myself Home

Walk Myself Home

by

There is an epidemic of violence against women in Canada and the world. For many women physical and sexual assault, or the threat of such violence, is a daily reality. Walk Myself Home is an anthology of poetry, fiction, nonfiction and oral interviews on the subject of violence against women including contributions by Kate Braid, Yasuko Thanh and Susan Musgrave...

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Versions of North

Versions of North

by Lainsbury, G.P.

In this late-modern period of slackened meaning, G.P. Lainsbury's Versions of North attempts to locate poetic consciousness in the drifting concept of north, using avantgarde techniques to reveal connections between disparate elements of signification...

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Valley Sutra

Valley Sutra

by Gill, Kuldip

Memorials and the yearning to re-create the past permeate Valley Sutra, award-winning poet Kuldip Gill's new collection...

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Unfurled

Unfurled

by

Ambulance lights flash as a baby is born on a busy city street, pine beetles paint forests a palette of new colours, a young boy faces a watery death under the ice of a frozen lake, and a mother stands in a bathtub at midnight wearing only her gumboots...

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Understories

Understories

by Rempel, Al

Understories explores the meeting of the natural, suburban and inner-city experiences of Prince George. These poems look beneath the daily observations of a place jostled between stripmalls and pubs, the university and the mill, and a landscape that presses in at every corner, revealing a sometimes gritty underside...

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To This Cedar Fountain

To This Cedar Fountain

by Braid, Kate

Emily Carr recorded the experience of the West Coast soul in her living landscapes and her portraits of BC's towering firs. Kate Braid, in To This Cedar Fountain, engages Carr in conversation as only a kindred spirit could: a West Coaster, an artist, a woman with an affinity for timber. In these poems Carr's sensual paintings envelop Braid; Emily romances the trees while Kate bears...

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Threadbare Like Lace 2nd Edition

Threadbare Like Lace 2nd Edition

by Baldwin, Jacqueline

The reflective poems in Threadbare Like Lace comment on the world as Jacqueline Baldwin has experienced it. She is an expatriate New Zealander who has lived and worked in such far-flung places as Montreal and the remote Robson Valley in the Canadian Rockies. Her poems are a mediation between the private and public worlds and are reminiscent of many of the Black Mountain poets...

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This Isn't the Apocalypse We Hoped For

This Isn't the Apocalypse We Hoped For

by Rempel, Al

How do we navigate a world of fast-food joints, big-box stores and traffic jams, where people grandstand in the deli and homeless men announce the end of the world through “slats in the sky”? Where the cumulative result of our lifestyle is a gyre of garbage and plastic in the North Pacific? Al Rempel’s This Isn’t the Apocalypse We Hoped For addresses this concern with humility and...

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The Silence of Horses

The Silence of Horses

by Dufour, Lorne

We need no longer hide
behind concepts of alienation
or the language of clever linguistics
while the poor are dying
we need the silence
of our horses...

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The Dirty Knees of Prayer

The Dirty Knees of Prayer

by Shay, Timothy

The poems in THE DIRTY KNEES OF PRAYER are hot and dark as night rain. The new Honeywell fan blows whips of simmered air against Shay's glistening back. He suspects a dystopian future and apparently it has arrived. These poems shrug at death. A tide of smoke rises and hovers over the city. Shay's picture is taken for his collection of grief and apocalyptic love...

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The Centre

The Centre

by McKinnon, Barry

These poems span fifteen years of life in the northern industrial output of Prince George, BC. They portray family, friendship, sex, death, health, work, love and human hope as subjects of a harsh social, economic, and bureaucratic system that is itself trapped in its own contradictions and ironies...

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The Average Height of Flight

The Average Height of Flight

by Kope, Beth

The poems in AVERAGE HEIGHT OF FLIGHT are founded in the landscape of coastal BC, built on the losses within the narrator's life in counterpoint to her walks in the natural world. In forests with her dog, along watersheds and hill climbs, Beth Kope goes off trail to find inspiration and time for meditation...

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Steeling Effects

Steeling Effects

by Byers, Jane

Why do some of us learn to bend? Others break? How do we move from shame to being "enough"? How do we bounce back stronger after adversity and then embrace our own humanity with its flawed beauty? In her first full collection of poetry, Jane Byers explores her personal experience with resilience, beginning with her own difficult birth, which she describes as "inoculation against despair...

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Soft Geography

Soft Geography

by Wigmore, Gillian

2008 Winner of the ReLit Award for Poetry

Shortlisted for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize


"What a wonderful, fresh voice Gillian Wigmore brings to the page. These wise poems know the push and pull within family. They reveal the tender truths behind the rough edges of small-town life...

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Skeena

Skeena

by de Leeuw, Sarah

An elegy to and celebration of British Columbia's second-longest river, one at the centre of contemporary conversations about resource extraction and northern geographies, SKEENA is an assemblage of voices, stories and histories both about the river and from the river's perspective...

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Sit You Waiting

Sit You Waiting

by Clark, Kim

Kim Clark believes that before multiple sclerosis began its insidious infiltration, there was no writing in her. That somehow the damaging changes that shut down certain functions in her brain also opened up other unused areas that housed a secret love affair with language and all its possibilities, its delicious sights and sounds and intimations...

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Similar Titles

  • On/Me
  • Rising Tides: Reflections for Climate Changing Times
  • The Brightest Thing
  • Chenille or Silk
  • How She Read
  • Paradise, Later Years
  • The Small Way
  • Playing into Silence
  • Elemental
  • All Violet
  • Flightpaths
  • Refugium
  • Acquired Community
  • Eating Matters
  • Your Good Hat
  • Walk Myself Home
  • Versions of North
  • Valley Sutra
  • Unfurled
  • Understories
  • To This Cedar Fountain
  • Threadbare Like Lace 2nd Edition
  • This Isn't the Apocalypse We Hoped For
  • The Silence of Horses
  • The Dirty Knees of Prayer
  • The Centre
  • The Average Height of Flight
  • Steeling Effects
  • Soft Geography
  • Skeena
  • Sit You Waiting
  • Odes & Laments