we’ll be launching three new chapbooks Saturday, July 19th at PAVED Arts in Saskatoon. Come celebrate with some amazing book designers, poets, and visual artists, have a summer drink, and help us eat a mountain of delectable food. Our three new titles are:
Intertidal Zones (pictured at left) features images by internationally renowned Saskatoon artist Zachari Logan and poetry by Adrienne Gruber. Her playful, contradictory collection of poems argues with itself in a dos-a-dos style chapbook that can swing both ways.
Able Physiologists Discuss Grief Musculatures (centre) is a strange and challenging work from genius-physician-poet Shane Neilson. Exploring historical approaches to mental illness, and the iconography that has gone along with it, this beautifully constructed chapbook is “a song-critique, an identity-dirge, a question of cure.” A flat back binding with a cloth spine holds original marbled black paper by Frances Hunter (a nod to 18th and 19th century decorated papers), monoprints created for this chapbook by Dorothy Field, and contemporary illustrations that bridge the time span of the text.
Surrey Sonnets, (right) by Kevin Spenst and Naomi MacDougall, is a collection of poems examining the city in which Spenst grew up, his single parent family through the 70s and 80s, and his father’s schizophrenia – all printed on perforated drink coasters with the typefaces you would expect in a quaint small-town pub, bound in a discreet red volume. “‘Every decision is a wishbone,’ writes Adam Dickinson. In your hands you have a choice: tear some coasters from this chapbook and wish for a beer or keep it intact and wish for wine. Above all, imbibe what you love,” Spenst says to his readers.