CONTENTS
Excerpts from
BEGIN WITH THE END IN MIND
by Emma Healey
QUIVERING LAND
by Roewan Crowe
SIN EATER
by Angela Hibbs
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BEGIN WITH THE END IN MIND
by Emma Healey
Residing on the border between poetry and prose, Emma Healey masterfully navigates the
tension and balance between the two forms. Her writing examines the animate qualities of
seemingly inanimate things and explores personal relationships, collective and individual
human experiences, as they are distilled through our encounters with such things as the
CBC, chain bookstores, the contents of a kitchen, or the expanse of a whole city. Begin With
the End in Mind tests the capabilities of the prose poem—the specific rhythmic, lyrical, and
syntactic possibilities of the form, and the opportunities for play, renegotiating the more
traditional/technical elements of lyric and line that are afforded the prose poet.
Everything Is Glass
My full name is Emma Flannery Lawrence Healey. There’s
a reason. I tell this story a lot. My mother went into
labour with me during a screening of Edward Scissorhands
in Toronto, January of 1991. It was snowing. They didn’t
own a car. You don’t need to know this: the light on her
face or the speed of her stomach and hands, what my father
said, how they stayed for the whole thing anyway, how the
snow, how the sound. On my kitchen floor now where
I’m sitting to write this, there’s a half-empty carton of
ruby red grapefruit juice, pulp-free, and a cookbook titled
Becoming Vegetarian which I’m not. What I tell people isn’t
exactly like this, what I’m telling you here. I own seventeen
T-shirts and twenty-five pairs of socks. I counted, just
now, for this. My left foot is bigger than my right by two
millimeters and I’m blind in one eye. 5'6"ish, Earl Grey
tea always with milk and sugar both these things are about
me. How about this: My mother went into labour with
me in Vancouver, September of 1989, the same day the
Monkees disbanded. My father was changing a lightbulb
in the living room and broke it when he heard her scream.
Glass everywhere, and even with her going Michael I
think we have to from the kitchen face-up on the freezing
linoleum he just stood there barefoot and both eyes on the
shine of it. They did not own a broom. It wasn’t raining.
Twenty-two pairs of socks and three pairs of tights I guess
is more accurate, and orange pekoe sometimes. It’s my
right eye the blue one and I don’t mind, I can see through
walls. I like orange juice better than grapefruit. When
I was born, ’92 in the Peterborough General Hospital
mid-August, my father who didn’t know this was going to
happen picked pieces of glass from the treads of his shoes
and thumbed through Today’s Parent magazine, the nurses
somewhat surreal at Peterborough General, all male for
some reason and wearing scrubs exactly one size too small
each, uniformly, all of them, due to some clerical/ordering
error, my mother different-roomed glossy with morphine
still awake and breathing like traffic. My kitchen floor now:
three half-empty bottles of white wine, one full grapefruit,
four lightbulbs, a breadknife, three pairs of tights, A Good
Man Is Hard to Find or Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
or a cookbook two T-shirts a measuring tape and a sock.
In the bright white of the credits and gasping my mother
coat half-on and no shoes said to my dad I think Emma
and he said No I think Flannery. I don’t actually own a
measuring tape, I was exaggerating, I’m sorry. I have one
of those elementary school thin plastic rulers that’s thirty
inches long and I climbed the thing up my side and marked
every end point with red pen, which is why 5'6"ish. My
left eye is pretty bad too but that’s not the same thing, the
hospital strangely quiet and poorly lit my mother with
arms crossed over her swollen stomach and hurting my
father made arguments: morals, peafowl, Southern Gothic,
and my mother said Kissed once only once and my father
said Lupus, because of the lupus and she said Exactly,
what’s wrong with you which is how in Cobourg, Ontario
in August of ’90 I started my first ever argument about
Death of the Author, my father still covered in glass and
my mother still breathing. A male nurse in what looked
like shorts poked his head in to see if everything was okay.
My kitchen floor’s covered with lightbulbs and books now,
so I’m sitting in the sink with my laptop balanced on my
knees. I have tights on. My mother said I’ll arm wrestle
you and my father said What and the nurse said Okay and
nobody thought about Edward Scissorhands because that
movie still hadn’t come out yet. The paradox here is that
if I get up then I’ll step on the lightbulbs and ruin these
tights so I’ll have to rewrite it, this whole thing, it has to
be true with both of their faces the hospital still wet and
shining with weather it happened the floor and my kitchen
the thing with my mother and father, I tell this a lot. My
father said yes and my mother said nothing, and neither
with breathing and sharply let anyone win. Which is why
I’m here now, and in tights and with glass in the soles of my
shoes and my hands and I’m telling you this, and it’s true.
There’s a reason.
Voting Season
In the end we elected our friend Jeff prime minister. To be
honest we were just all so tired, so bored with the fucking
around, and Jeff seemed like the best option, it was April.
Could you blame us? (Answer: No you could not.) Things
were desparate, in those days. The smell of everything
reminded us of hair gel, even cats, and the skin around
our eyes was pool-deeper and gradient. We undertipped
constantly and stole our neighbours’ wireless without guilt
or apology. Our faces gave off this pale, sickly glow, in
motion in groups we looked like a school of dying squid.
Resigned more. You could tell time by us and not the good
kind. The steady lurching. We felt stuck under glass, there
were other things in our lives that needed looking after, our
boyfriends sent us ellipsis-heavy text messages asking when
we thought we’d be home and our wives were DVRing shows
we had never even heard of. The season was coming, outside,
even in our shoulders you could feel it and Jeff had the best
jeans and interpersonal skills of any of us. It seems obvious
now. When we had dreams they were anxious and posturemangling: podiums, compact fluorescents, reasonably
paced train crashings all achingly lucid and bilingual.
Coffee—coffee—was no longer a thing that we liked but a
thing where even the name of it made us throw up, totally
instantly, regardless. When we kissed (if we kissed) it made
sounds like the CBC and we tasted like press release, our
parents were quietly worried, if you say the word rhetoric ten
times fast it sounds imperative. Jeff has an excellent record
collection, Jeff has helped us move at least three times and
once burned every season of The Wire for us and he didn’t
correct other people when they mispronounced the names
of foreign countries, even though he always knew.
Probably we came on a little strong, our voices pitched
maybe too keen but in the end it still worked, we could see it
even then, that first day in the kitchen with all our materials
spread out across the table and Jeff nodding, Jeff-like, into
the afternoon. We come prepared, always. We felt clean all
the way to our nerve endings. Hope had renewed us. We
wanted to sing. Even when we went into his room to count
his sweaters we already knew, while he stood in the doorway
with his arms crossed, his eyebrows a little bit raised that way
he has, watching us. We felt around in the closet but already
we were imagining what it would be like to hold hands with
girls we didn’t even really know, to teach our children to
skateboard, to sleep in until 11, to make nachos for dinner
and enact policy reform with a swift, stunning grace, to wear
good shoes again. Jeff pushed into the doorframe a bit and
asked us if we wanted coffee. We politely declined. When
Jeff speaks you feel comforted but also like you’re ready for
something you weren’t previously ready for. Outside, spring
was petitioning the neighbourhood. We lost count and it
didn’t even matter. We’d already won.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Emma Healey is a Montreal-based writer and the founder and editor-in-chief of the Incongruous Quarterly, an online literary magazine devoted to the publication of unpublishable
literature. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in magazines such as Matrix, Broken Pencil
and the Void, and in various online publications including Joyland, Said the Gramophone,
Cellstories, and Lemon Hound. Her work has been featured in the anthologies Can’tLit: Fearless Fiction from Broken Pencil Magazine and Gulch: An Anthology of Poetry and Prose. Her
poem “The National Research Council Official Time Signal” was published as a limited edition monograph by No Press in 2011. She was the 2010 recipient of the Irving Layton award
for poetry, and was shortlisted for the same award in 2011.
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Purchase Begin With the End in Mind from:
http://www.mcnallyrobinson.com/9781894037624/emma-healey/begin-endmind?blnBKM=1
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QUIVERING LAND
by Roewan Crowe
Roewan Crowe’s compelling and haunting literary debut, Quivering Land, is a rather queer
Western, engaging with poetics and politics to reckon with the legacies of violence and colonization in the West.
Written in a sparse style, this lonely, sometimes brutal book invites the reader on a powerful journey with Clem, Violet, and a dead girl in a red dress. Clem, a lone cowboy, caught
in the inevitable violence of the Western, compulsively rides through ghost towns and Monument Valley. Violet is an artist who pulls dead bodies, guns, and memory into her studio,
immersing herself in a creative process, seeking to understand the relationships among aggression, vulnerability and the imagination. Disrupting the story are the ghostly visitations
of a dead child who travels the western landscape unsettling romanticized, filmic images of
Monument Valley.
Interspersed in the text are fragile, beautiful images painstakingly cut from paper, created
by artist Paul Robles. This experimental long poem, a gritty feminist meditation on trauma,
violence and the possibilities of art, is as powerful as a Smith and Wesson Schofield rifle.
Bullet Toss
Girl trotting like horse through sandstone buttes
sliding down sand dunes
skinny coyote at her side
late day sun at their backs.
Dodging yellow mounds of broom snakeweed
patch of desert wolfberry
pops plump red berries into her mouth
dog rolling in the dirt.
Bird darts around them
high above a craggy pillar of ore.
They gallop to moon-like crater, old uranium mine now filled with rain water.
Girl plunges her hands into yellow dust-covered liquid
sucking toxic into her mouth, drinking deeply.
Papery wings of the saltbush offer her seeds to chew on.
She eats the seeds, the salty leaves, drinks more water.
Renewed, girl and coyote tear through the valley
head for the monument of yellow dirt.
They race to the top of the hill
tongues panting
she and coyote digging
toes and claws into sandy stained soil
revealing hundreds of bullets.
Her small hands collect them
from the contaminated heap of dirt
coyote recovers bullets too,
tenderly, with its teeth.
They gather and gather
pile them into a monument
copper, bronze, steel and lead.
Girl and coyote on top of the hill
moon rising above them.
Tossing a bullet up into the air, she shouts
Heads, I’m dead.
Tails, I’m not.
Lifting Stone
Silence. Bare white walls. No windows, dim lights.
Violet sits in the centre of the room, at a small square oak table. An empty
wooden chair across from her. Projected on the wall behind her is a silent
video of Monument valley. The projected landscape continually loops.
She waits for the next visitor to sit with her.
When someone arrives she picks up a book from under the table and reads:
Lifting Stone
Kiss my stone. She did.
Kiss my stone again she did.
Kiss my stone over and over and over again she did.
I have cherrystones.
Gentle clingstones.
Do you think about peachstones. We find them very beautiful.
It is not alone their colour it is their siltstones that charm us.
We find it a change.
Lifting stone is so strange.
I came to speak about it.
Selected hailstones. Thunderstones are good.
Change your name.
Question and tombstone.
It’s raining. Don’t speak about it.
My baby is a sunstone. I want to tell them something.
Inkstone and firestone. We have bought a great many rhinestones.
Some are moonstones. They have not been lighted.
I did not mention gemstones.
Exactly.
Actually.
Question and fieldstone.
I find the limestone very good.
Lifting stone, monumental.
Lifting stone stonily.
Doesn’t that astonish you.
You did want me.
Say it again.
Bloodstone.
Lifting beside stone. Lifting kindly stone.
Sing to me I say.
Some women are stones not horses.
Lifting stone stonily.
Sing to me I say.
Lifting stone. Her horse.
After her performance, Violet gifts an artist book to the visitor.
Repeat performance.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Artist and theorist Roewan Crowe is energized by acts of disruption, transformation and
the tactical deployment of self-reflexivity. She has a particular interest in wounded landscapes and questioning what it means to be a queer, feminist settler living in Winnipeg/
Turtle Island. Recent work includes: digShift (ongoing), a decolonizing and environmental
reclamation project using site specific performance and multichannel installation to explore the shifting layers of at an abandoned gas station; and Queer Grit, a stop-motion animation that asks, “how can you be Queer on the prairies when your dad is John Wayne?”
Her scholarly work seeks to open meaningful encounters with art and explore new feminist
art practices. Her longstanding community practice is concerned with building engaged
feminist/queer/artist communities, and in addressing the reality of Murdered and Missing
Indigenous Women in Canada. She is an Associate Professor in the Women’s and Gender
Studies Department at the University of Winnipeg and Co-Director of The Institute for
Women’s & Gender Studies.
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Purchase Quivering Land from:
http://www.mcnallyrobinson.com/9781894037907/roewan-crowe/quivering-land?blnBKM=1.UaAMM5W3iRo
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SIN EATER
by Angela Hibbs
Sin Eater reassembles the seven deadly sins to reflect a modern context and culture. For her
third collection, Angela Hibbs explores and dissects the everyday and the extraordinary:
literary figures, office workers, “Everybody’s Baby,” the deconstruction of a Crazy Train,
cosmetic procedures, and understudy deities. Morality, etiquette and judgment are under a
microscope—removed from the theological, anchored in the here and now.
With nimble language and an uncommon wit, Hibbs reveals the fluidity of transgression
when traditional definitions no longer apply. Sin Eater is a bold new collection from one of
Canada’s brightest poetic voices.
Crazy Train: A Diagnostic Checklist
What makes the train crazy?
When did you first notice the train was crazy?
Is it only the train’s behavior that makes it crazy? Do the tracks or décor
or other passengers contribute to your impression of craziness?
What would a train that is not crazy be like?
Have you ever been on a train that you would describe as “not crazy”?
Would the train continue to be crazy if it were no longer on the rails?
Did you purchase a ticket on the train?
Can you locate an exit on the train?
Is it foreseeable that the train’s behavior could change?
Under what conditions would the train be endurable?
Are there other responses available to you besides fear?
Does the train remind you of anything?
Does the train remind you of anyone?
Light Detective
Boom boom boom
raps a yellow oval into the door.
Which room, which sale?
The oval will not disappear.
Impossible to fail
P.I. axes syntax
to tax the synapse
to the brink of collapse.
Leave stranger weather a stranger.
Our uncouth sleuth claims a booth,
picks his tooth, eyes a busker pollute
the silence with his flute. Whose flute?
Likely his own. Our dick stays mute.
He ’as nudding but achs for silent h’s.
In a polling booth he first uttered,
“In vermouth truth.”
The detective daytrades
adverbs for adjectives,
refuses to go unpaid.
His preferred rectangles are legal tender.
Untender, his methods.
Whither a door without a floor?
Let it wither. He undeals in metaphors.
He takes on a case, top secret
the privacy of the dick emphasized.
Top refers primarily to its position
on his desk. His time by him alone prized.
Though none are curious,
tell the details, he shant.
His own view never in doubt.
The five w’s populate his mant
ra. The evidence: a sail, unlighting a room,
avoided the passive voice by a hair.
for Angela Szczepaniak
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Angela Hibbs is the author of two previous collections of poetry, Passport (DC Books, 2006)
and Wanton (Insomniac Press, 2009). She holds a MA creative writing from Concordia
University. Her work appeared in the Poetry Is Public Is Poetry installation at the Toronto
Reference Library. She was awarded the 2010 Joseph S. Stauffer Prize.
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Purchase Sin Eater from:
http://www.mcnallyrobinson.com/9781894037495/angela-hibbs/sin-eater
ABOUT ARP
ARP Books was founded in 1996 in downtown Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. Our mandate is to publish a dynamic combination of cultural, fiction, and non-fiction titles with
an emphasis on progressive political analysis of contemporary issues, while encouraging
innovative new writing.
We have published an eclectic and engaging list, from Any Given Power, a book of short
stories by Giller Prize nominated author Alissa York, to a tragic tale of spin doctoring in the
highly acclaimed graphic novel The Listener by David Lester, and our best-selling book on the
politics of language, Grammar Matters, by Jila Ghomeshi.
We have served as an amplifier for some of the most exciting writings on Indigenous issues, with books such as Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back: Stories of Nishnaabeg Re-Creation, Resurgence, and
a New Emergence and Islands of Decolonial Love by Leanne Simpson, Aboriginal Rights Are Not Human
Rights and the Red Indians by Peter Kulchyski, and This is an Honour Song: Twenty Years Since the Blockades, a collection of writings exploring the impact of the 1990 resistance at Kanehsatà:ke.
Most recently, we gather a multitude of voices together for The Winter We Danced, a wide-ranging and powerful collection of writing and imagery from the Idle No More movement.
We explored moving pictures in Kino Delirium: The Films of Guy Maddin, the first book-length
study of the renowned director, and They Came From Within: A History of Canadian Horror Cinema,
the definitive (and perhaps only) book on that neglected and surprisingly important subject, both by Caelum Vatnsdal. We looked at pictures that are still, but are still moving, in
Framing Identity: Social Practices of Photography in Canada by Susan Close, and examined Canada’s
imperialist past and present in Todd Gordon’s Imperialist Canada.
Our abiding love of literature has led us to remarkable young poets like Emma Healey,
whose Begin with the End in Mind announced the debut of a strong and original new voice, and
Kaie Kellough, with his stunningly designed, jazz-infused riff on Canadian culture, Maple
Leaf Rag. Our list of poetry titles continues to expand with the long-form queer western Quivering Land from Roewan Crowe and the bold collection Sin Eater by Angela Hibbs. We’ve published some amazing prose, too, like the novel Gertrude Unmanageable, Deborah Schnitzer’s
profound meditation on aging, love and Gertrude Stein, and the unnerving and brilliant
short story collection All We Want is Everything, by Andrew F. Sullivan.
Our authors are world-renowned academics, first-time novelists, community activists,
and established writers from all over Canada who share our firm belief that the written
word can change the world, one reader at a time. We are proud of our catalogue of books—
books we hope will challenge, assist, entertain, and provoke you.
ABOUT THIS PUBLICATION
This digital sampler was distributed by Contemporary Verse 2 in the summer of 2014.
To download samplers from additional publishers, visit:
http://www.contemporaryverse2.ca/en/samplers
Cover photo by Cas Cornelissen