New Releases by Fred Wah

A bundle of Laurier Poetry books for course use that includes Fierce Departures (Dionne Brand); Sonosyntactics (Paul Dutton); The More Easily Kept Illusions (Al Purdy); False Laws of Narrative (Fred Wah0; and Sohkeyihta (Louise Bernice Halfe).

Laurier Poetry Pack #4 consists of 5 volumes from the Laurier Poetry series. Volumes contained in Laurier Poetry Pack #4: 9780889204904 The More Easily Kept Illusions; 9781554580385 Fierce Departures; 9781771121323 Sonosyntactics; 9781554580460 The False Laws of Narrative; 9781771124119 Social Poesis

Stemming from a 114-foot-long installation, Beholden: A Poem As Long As the River by acclaimed poets Fred Wah and Rita Wong aim to synthesize the poets' experiences along the Columbia River with analyses of contemporary and historical research material, thereby contributing to a larger dialogue around the river through visual art, writing and public engagement.

Scree offers the definitive compendium of Fred Wah's early poetic reflections on ethnicity, racial hybridity, language, and the local.

The year 2013 being the fiftieth anniversary of the Vancouver Poetry Conference at UBC, Wah uses the occasion to outline how a group of young poets at UBC (and this included George Bowering, Jamie Read, and himself among others) were discovering, through their publication of poetry in the newsletter TISH, that it was possible to write in new forms. The 1963 Vancouver Poetry Conference brought home to them that they had "permission" to shatter the poem's strict line patterns. Wah notes that there was never a TISH manifesto but that the conference confirmed the group's sense that the 1960s would bring into being a new kind of poetry, that he now had permission to "disturb the words," as in jazz, to play around with the music, to move into a poetry beyond the restrictions and weight of tradition and authority. It was also, according to Wah, to be a turn away from the stubborn persistence of the lyric "I," what Charles Olson in "Projective Verse" called "the private-soul-at-any-public-wall." In reflecting on the arc of his own publishing career, Wah notes that a new importance was given to place, but place was not seen as static, for poetry now could be used as a "tool" in a larger investigation of "process" in the creation of the individual within time and place. Wah also realized that he continued to want a sense of collectivity, and he went on to create and publish a number of small literary magazines. In his more recent writing there has been a new fusion of identity with the concept of process along with race, and the resulting concept of hybridity.

The False Laws of Narrative is a selection of Fred Wah’s poems covering the poets entire poetic trajectory to date. A founding editor of Tish magazine, Wah was influenced by leading progressive and innovative poets of the 1960s and was at the forefront of the exploration of racial hybridity, multiculturalism, and transnational family roots in poetry. The selection emphasizes his innovative poetic range. Wah is renowned as one of Canada’s finest and most complex lyric poets and has been lauded for the musicality of his verse. Louis Cabri’s introduction offers a paradigm for thinking about how sound is actually structured in Wah’s improvisatory poetry and offers fresh insights into Wah’s context and writing. In an afterword by the poet himself, Wah presents a dialogue between editor and poet on the key themes of the selected poems and reveals his abiding concerns as poet and thinker.

Astonishing series of collaborative image-text projects, Sentenced to Light whispers between words and pictures in a space we call culture.

A critical scrapbook collected from fifteen years of writing. Contains essays, reviews, interviews, journals, notes, and poetic improvisations on contemporary poetry and identity.

Diamond Grill is a rich banquet where Salisbury Steak shares a menu with chicken fried rice, bird's nest soup sets the stage for Christmas pudding; where racism from whites for being Chinese and from Chinese for being white simmers behind the shiny clean surface of the action in the cafe. This story of family and identity, migration and integration, culture and self-discovery is told through family history, memory, glimpses of life, and the occasional recipe.

Poet Fred Wah explores of possibilities contemporary language with these jazzlike improvisations and unpredictable wordplays that outmaneuver the text to get home without being tagged.

Beginning with an editorial conversation around "the work so far" in 1990, this book has become a great deal more than simply a "progress report" from one of our leading poets. "The penetration of Wah's poetry is into essence". -- Montreal Gazette

From a 'sky clearing moon' to Pachinko neon to the Hume Hotel Ballroom, Fred Wah searches for his father within various forms and embraces. This is a beautiful book and we are in the muscle and limbs of rough cut clear language - live bright fish slapping the table. The Elite series is stunning and rare. --Michael Ondaatje.

An important and enduring long poem from the most poetical of the TISH poets.

This volume includes work selected from each of Fred Wah's earlier books of poetry: Lardeau, Mountain, among, Treeand Pictograms from the Interior of B.C.; in addition to unpublished work and work from the manuscript edition of Breathin' My Name with a Sigh.