Coach House Books

Coach House Books edited the description of Isobel and Emile Friday, May 14, 2010.

• This is the story of Isobel and Emile.

  They wake up beside each other one morning, and they slowly get out of bed. It is the last time that they will sleep together. They know it. They do not want it to be the last time but they know that it is.

  They get out of bed and they go to a train station. Emile gets onto a train. Isobel does not.

  She stands on the platform and she watches him go. He is going to the city, where he will be an artist. He will make puppets, and films of puppets, that struggle to say something he does not have the words for. She will stay in the small town, in the small room where they lived. She will work at a small grocery store and write letters to Emile while she works up the courage to do something more.

  Told in a stark, minimalist voice, Isobel and Emile is the hypnotizing story of two lovers without each other. It is a story of struggling with loss and a loneliness that threatens to consume them. It is about staying true to what they hold dear, no matter that it is hopeless and that nothing will ever come of it, because sometimes that is all that is left.

  And sometimes, it is enough.

Coach House Books edited the description of The Inquisition Yours Friday, May 14, 2010.

• In her ambitious follow-up to Hagiography, acclaimed poet Jen Currin continues her unique exploration of the surrealist lyric, constructing a strong case that, in these frightening times, it may be the best poetic mode for capturing the complexities of lived experience. In tongues alternately vulnerable, defiant, resigned, and hopeful, The Inquisition Yours speaks to the atrocities of our time – war, environmental destruction, terrorism, cancer, and the erosion of personal rights – fashioning a tenuous bridge between the political and the personal. Trying to make sense of a world where even language is 'a danger,' Currin’s poems reject the old storylines in favour of a vigilant awareness, and wonder what might happen if we 'change the feared penmanship' and embrace a narrative that empowers everyone.

Coach House Books edited the description of Rhapsodomancy Friday, May 14, 2010.

• Reading is slow, and writing is slower. Words are old-fashioned. Why not consider the communication of the future? In 1837, Sir Isaac Pitman began a sixty-year obsession with producing a system of Shorthand that accurately and swiftly captures voice as evidence of the mind’s movements. In the 1950s, John Malone developed Unifon, a forty-character phonetic alphabet intended for international communication by the airline industry. Both projects reached for artful utility, and both have largely been forgotten.

  In Rhapsodomancy, kevin mcpherson eckhoff remembers them. Exploring these two phonic alphabets as image, these poems playfully interrogate the relationship between voice and visual poetry. Can pictures represent voice? Can unutterable writing express thought? Rhapsodomancy offers an imaginative response to such questions via empty suits reciting onomatopoeia, letters defying the laws of reality, and drawings divining the future.