Backlist
Projects produced under the flag of Greenboathouse Books

Woods | Pages

Jay MillAr

¶ The remaining leaves rustle. Who are you, ask the owls. And you reply: where are you? Shadows of branches cast along the ground; you turn another page. You’re in the woods. In these pages. Taking a deep breath, the sound of your lungs exhaling is similar to the sound made by the leaves. “Perhaps these woods are tied to / a book of letters invisible / to the naked enjambment of our / lives…”

¶ Woods | Pages, Jay MillAr’s new collection, furthers his exploration of the natural world, which those familiar with his work will recall from Mycological Studies (Coach House, 2002) and False Maps and Other Creatures (Nightwood, 2005). But what can words do that the leaf can’t, that the tree’s crackle can’t? Here, on these pages, is a fine and meditative stoicism.

Jay Millar is a Toronto poet, editor, publisher, and virtual bookseller. He is the author of False Maps for Other Creatures (2005), Mycological Studies (2002), and The Ghosts of Jay MillAr (2000). His most recent collection is the small blue (2007). In 2006 he published Double Helix, a collaborative "novel" written with Stephen Cain. Millar is the shadowy figure behind BookThug, an independent publishing house dedicated to interesting and innovative work by well-known and emerging writers, as well as Apollinaire's Bookshoppe, a virtual bookstore that specializes in the books that no one wants to buy. A long-time fixture of the Toronto writing and publishing scene, Jay has participated in such diverse projects as the UNBC/Via Rail Poetry Train, The Scream in High Park, Test Readings Series and Influency: A Poetry Salon. He is also the co-editor (with Mark Truscott) of BafterC, a small magazine of contemporary writing. Currently Jay teaches creative writing at George Brown College.

2008

5.125" × 8.875"; 20pp.
ISBN: 978-1-894744-24-9

Out of Print

Colophon:

Printed on Mohawk Concept Vellum, wrapped in a handmade Tibetan flyleaf and a cover of Canson Mi-Tientes, hand-stitched with archival waxed linen thread. The wrapper is Italian Florentine Portofino.

Limited to 100 numbered copies handsewn in paper wrappers, and 26 copies lettered A-Z for private distribution, all signed by the author.

Suspended: a short thesis in seven parts

Kate Hall

¶ Imagine that you're hungry, perhaps scratching your head, half asleep. You have an irresistible craving for chipotle-lime mustard and it's way past midnight. Too many questions are ringing in your head, such as "What are all these Elephants doing in my apartment?"

¶ Kate Hall's Suspended describes a post-something (post-anything, really) existential crisis: "The envelope of pills you sent / arrived the same day as the shipment / of elephants and disembodied /voices. Skeptics do not believe / we can prove we are not dreaming, / but they are very glad for the existence of /anti-psychotics." Using poetry to investigate the natural (and not-so natural) world around us, the speaker of these seemingly confessional poems asks the Big Questions with a lightness and humour that is rare.

¶ Previous poets (Stevens to Tennyson) appear throughout the speaker's mediation, although the old poets don't seem to offer anything but more questions. Just how do we come to terms with existence? Does poetry offer us a convincing solution? Thankfully, in the midst of provoking and exploring such questions, Suspended refuses to condescend an answer. Instead the poems linger, like an insomniac in front of a late night fridge, between pathos and discovery.

Kate Hall is a poet based in Paris, France where she is working on her second poetry manuscript and teaching at Quai D'Orsay Language Center. Most recently, her poems have appeared in jubilat, PRISM International, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Open City and Boston Review. With a keen interest in book arts, she was manager and editor for the chapbook publisher Delirium Press from 2000-2007. Kate is a graduate of the M.A. program at Concordia University. She would like to express her thanks to Jason and Aaron for all their work on her chapbook.

2007-08

5.125" ×9"; 22pp.
ISBN: 978-1-894744-23-2

Out of Print

Colophon:

Printed on Rising Bristol Vellum with a cover of Canson Mi-Tientes and a handmade Tibetan wrapper, hand-stitched with archival waxed linen thread.

Limited to 100 numbered copies handsewn in paper wrappers, and 26 copies lettered A-Z for private distribution, all signed by the author.

residual

Souvankham Thammavongsa

¶ Residual follows Souvankham Thamavongsa's award-winning debut, Small Arguments (Pedlar, 2003). Thamavongsa's poems explore their subjects in startlingly meticulous ways: light, turtles, and ostriches are all described in finely chosen lines - originally composed on graph paper - that float across the page. Each object, each thing, described with a forensic precision. Hers is a poetry that approaches the world with the focus of an autopsy. There is both care and indifference here that few other poets have the ability to sense. The result is a quiet, seemingly unassuming, suite of haunted poems.

Souvankham Thammavongsa is the author of Small Arguments (Pedlar Press, 2003).

2006

5.375" × 7.75"; 16p.
ISBN-13: 978-1-894744-21-8

Out of Print

Alcuin Society Book Design Award Winner

Colophon:

Printed on Rising Bristol Vellum with a cover of Canson Mi-Tientes and a handmade Tibetan wrapper, hand-stitched with archival waxed linen thread.

Limited to 100 numbered copies handsewn in paper wrappers, and 26 copies lettered A-Z for private distribution, all signed by the author.

Those Girls

Jessica Westhead

¶ In Those Girls, Jessica Westhead's new collection of short stories, the style of Samuel Beckett meets the humour and content of a Dilbert cartoon. Westhead writes about modern suburban life with pathos, wit and razor-sharp dialogue. To read these stories is to take pleasure in the mundane, daily language we hear everywhere we go. Few people have the touch necessary to pull this off without seeming condescending or rude, but Westhead does it effortlessly. Those Girls narrates a bunch of guys whose lives are preoccupied with women - the women both in their lives and in their fantasies that they never quite understand. This is a book about how rarely people relate and the inexplicable nature of gender. These guys are neither articulate nor successful; they fumble through life spouting office clichés and eating combos. They talk about women at work, during lunch, or overhear them on the commuter train. They take advice from the wrong people and get obsessed with their co-workers' wives. These guys constantly try to get the attention of those girls and figure out what makes them tick, but all to no avail.

Jessica Westhead is a Toronto writer and freelance editor. Her short fiction has appeared in Matrix, Forget Magazine, Taddle Creek, Geist, THIS Magazine, Kiss Machine and the anthology Desire, Doom & Vice, and is forthcoming in The Antigonish Review. She also made poetry winner, a zine-exposé that blew the National Library of Poetry wide open. She has been featured in a number of Toronto reading series, including the Idler Pub, I.V. Lounge, Pontiac Quarterly and Lexiconjury, and has recently written a novel about an orange juice legacy, love and the perils of office life called Pulpy and Midge.

2006

5.125" × 6.625"; 36p.
ISBN-13: 978-1-894744-21-8

Out of Print

Colophon:

Printed on Mohawk Concept Vellum, wrapped in a handmade Tibetan flyleaf and a cover of Canson Mi-Tientes, hand-stitched with archival waxed linen thread. The wrapper is Italian Florentine Portofino.

Limited to 100 numbered copies handsewn in paper wrappers, and 26 copies lettered A-Z for private distribution, all signed by the author.

Life, Still & Otherwise

Sina Queyras

¶ A series of prose poems, Sina Queyras' Life, Still and Otherwise presents snap-shots of framed minute detail. From "The Boys of Smith Street" to "The Meat Painter," Queyras captures moments assembled in eerily beautiful tableaux vivants. These poems remind us of the French term for still life, nature mort (literally, dead nature). Not just poems about life per se these poems document the death of each moment: a clutter of polaroids marking things past. Descriptive and rich, each piece in this new collection comes to life in the reader's mind.

Sina Queyras is the editor of Open Field: Thirty Contemporary Canadian Poets (Persea, New York). She is the author of Slip (2001, ECW) and Teeth Marks (2004, Nightwood). Her third collection of poetry, Lemon Hound, has recently been released from Coach House Books. Sina teaches at Rutgers and lives with her partner in Brooklyn.

2005

5" × 8.5"; 32p.
Numbered: ISBN 1-894744-19-5
Lettered: ISBN 1-894744-20-9

Out of Print

Alcuin Society Book Design Award Winner

Colophon:

Printed on acid-free 80lb Gilbert Realm Text, the wrapper on handmade 100% cotton rag from New Delhi with Indian cotton dark green flyleaves; hand-stitched with archival waxed "natural" linen thread.

Limited to 74 numbered copies handsewn in paper wrappers, with 26 copies hardbound in boards, lettered A-Z, all signed by the author.

tengo sed

Shane Rhodes

Shane Rhodes' collection is a series of prose poems, lyrics and other complaints that chronicle a movement between Mexico and Canada. In a collection rich with detail, we read about the preparation of camotes, and of the "unending labour" of the sea. We see murals, thick with dust and irony. Guns are fired. Children join the festivities. Beautiful and mocking, serious and playful, these poems ask a simple, but pertinent question: how does one translate place?

Shane Rhodes has published poetry, essays and reviews in magazines, journals and newspapers across Canada. He has also had work broadcast on CBC Radio One's Definitely Not the Opera, Between the Covers and This Morning. He has been an editor with The Fiddlehead, filling Station and Qwerty. Shane won the Alfred G. Bailey Award and the Alberta Book Award for Poetry for his first collection, The Wireless Room. His second book, holding pattern, was published in Spring 2002 by NeWest Press.

2004

5.0" × 7.75"; 28p.
Numbered: ISBN 1-894744-17-9
Lettered: ISBN 1-894744-18-7

Out of Print

Alcuin Society Book Design Award Winner

Colophon:

Printed on acid-free 80lb Gilbert Realm Text, the wrapper on Khadi Bhutanese Tsasho, with a Legion Thai Mango flyleaf and a blank cover of Legion India Jute; hand-stitched with archival waxed linen thread.

Limited to 74 numbered copies handsewn in paper wrappers, with 26 copies, lettered A-Z, in a hard-bound triptych case, all signed by the author.

The Land Beyond

Matt Rader

¶ Matt Rader's collection of poems, The Land Beyond, is on a double edge: the geographical edge of Canada - Vancouver Island and the City of Vancouver - and the edge of loss and despair always in, and sometimes overtaking, our lives. The Land Beyond flips from childhood memories to car crashes with the precision of a switchblade. Rader's poems are creepy tales of grieving and memory, giving the West Coast imaginary a stark, almost rustic gothic as it is hardly ever seen. The poems are about what happens beyond a given time, place, or incident, beyond the past and present, beyond memory, despair, or fear, beyond the last line.

Matt Rader is the publisher of Mosquito Press and co-founder of Crash: Vancouver's Indie Writer's Fest. He lives in Vancouver..

2003

5.5" × 8.625"; 24p.
ISBN 1-894744-16-0

Out of Print

Alcuin Society Book Design Award Winner

Colophon:

Printed on acid-free 80lb Gilbert Realm Text, the cover on St. Armand Canal handmade 100% Jute with Canson Mi-Tientes flyleafs; hand-stitched with archival waxed linen thread.

Limited to 56 numbered copies, all signed by the author.

this cake is for the party

Sarah Lucille Selecky

¶ Sarah Lucille Selecky's collection of stories This Cake is for the Party explores the terrain of friendship, relationships, and food, in a terse, yet light prose. These character-driven stories follow a number of couples as they walk the hazardous line of trust and affection while dining with their closest friends. Along with subtle portraits of people fumbling through relationships, Selecky's prose shines, with both lavish and understated details, giving the stories a rich ambiguity. The character's lives, which form constellation-like patterns, slowly emerge and in the process discover how arbitrary, yet alluring, those patterns can be, even when straining with the lightest possible things. The stories are also about coming and going, about our movements despite ourselves.

Sarah Lucille Selecky holds a degree in Cultural Studies from Trent University and studied creative writing at the University of Victoria. Her stories have been published in The Sun Magazine, WordWorks, Fire and Reason and The Peterborough Review. She is a past Vice President of the Victoria School of Writing, where she taught a short fiction workshop series. She wrote these stories while living in Victoria.

2003

4.5" × (approx.) 7.0"; 32p.
ISBN 1-894744-15-2

Out of Print

Colophon:

Printed on acid-free 70lb Gilbert Realm Text, the cover on 100% Cotton, handmade India White with Canson Mi-Tientes flyleaves; hand-stitched with archival waxed linen thread.

Limited to 56 numbered copies, all signed by the author.

The Eye-Shift of Surface

Meredith Quartermain

¶ An astonishing collection of prose poems by Meredith Quartermain, The Eye-Shift of Surface explores the permutations of the word "I" (its abbreviations, roots, utterance and grammar) and its intimate connection with the word "eye." Seeing this word play further through textured language that highlights connotation, assonance, and rhythm over reference, Eye-Shift observes the ways in which words work with master narratives and socially construct selves. Here are the vocabularies of "I" including ways in which the letter is used as more than linguistic container of self. Anti-confessional in tone these playful associations challenge the transparent notion that "I" sees everything. Eye-Shift explores the blurs between self, world and language; a peripheral vision in language that reveals more than meets the "I."

Meredith Quartermain has published and read her work in Canada, the US and Britain. Her chapbooks include Terms of Sale (Meow, 1996), Abstract Relations (Keefer Street, 1998), Veers (Backwoods Broadsides, 1998), Spatial Relations (Diaeresis, 2001) and Inland Passage (housepress, 2001). With Robin Blaser, she recently completed a series of poems, entitled Wanders (Nomados, 2002), some of which have appeared in Matrix. Her work has also appeared in West Coast Line, Queen Street Quarterly, Raddle Moon, Five Fingers Review, Chain, Sulfur, Tinfish, Potepoetzine, Alterran Poetry Assemblage, East Village Poetry Web, on word, Goodfoot, and The Capilano Review, and is forthcoming in West Coast Line and Canadian Literature.

2003

5.625" × 5.5"; 52p.
ISBN 1-894744-14-4

Out of Print

Colophon:

Printed on acid-free 80lb Pastelle Text with 70lb Fabriano Ingres; jacket printed on 70lb Genesis Birch; hand-stitched with archival waxed-linen thread.

Limited to 52 numbered copies, all signed by the author.

A Flame on the Spanish Stairs: John Keats in Rome

Douglas Barbour

¶ Douglas Barbour's new series consists of quasi-sonnets, word-line acrostics, based on fourteen word-phrases found in the letters of John Keats. In turns characteristic of Barbour's recent work - including Fragmenting Body, etc and Breath Takes - A Flame on the Spanish Stairs uses linguistic techniques, such as homolinguistic translation, as modes of experimentation to explore the limits of conventional lyric poetry. Formally innovative, this short series of poems follows the last thoughts of a sickening Keats through the streets of Rome. Barbour's use of Keats' letters as pre-text calls the structure of narrative lyric into question. Once associated with an internalized speaker, the lyric poem is turned upside down. Far from being cold and formal explorations, these poems are affected by a great sense of learning, a longing or melancholy, and the final thoughts of Keats are rendered with a delicate human closeness.

Douglas Barbour is a professor in the Department of English, University of Alberta, where he teaches creative writing, modern poetry, Canadian Literature, and science fiction and fantasy. His critical books include studies of poets Daphne Marlatt, John Newlove, and bpNichol (all ECW Press 1992), and Michael Ondaatje (Twayne 1993). Volumes of poetry include Visible Visions: Selected Poems (NeWest Press 1984), Story for a Saskatchewan Night (rdcpress 1989), Fragmenting Body, etc (NeWest Press 2000) and, most recently, Lyric/Anti-lyric (NeWest Press 2001).

2002

5.0" × 7.75"; 28p.
ISBN 0-9685357-8-X

Out of Print

Colophon:

Printed on acid-free 80lb Pastelle Text, the cover on 120lb Canson Mi-Tientes (French-flaps); hand-stitched with archival linen thread.

Limited to 100 numbered copies, all signed by the author.

a translation: stones & ice

rob mclennan

¶ Now a household name in Canadian poetry and admirably one of Canada's few poets who actually manages to make a living writing poetry, keeping up with rob's poetic output can be somewhat daunting. However, his work does tie together in various ways. The titles of each poem in this series, for example, form a poem of their own, published in his recent collection, paper hotel (broken jaw, 2002). Always, it seems, interested in the relationship between sense and non-sense, between a world of language and a world of things, these poems consciously consider the act of translation, the ways in which one form translates into another, and the ways in which it refuses to do so.

Rob Mclennan is an Ottawa-based poet, editor, publisher, & a few other things. the author of over 3 dozen poetry chapbooks, his seventh trade collection is paper hotel (Broken Jaw Press). The editor/publisher of above/ground press & STANZAS magazine (both nearing 10th anniversaries), he is also responsible for a number of other books, including evergreen: six new poets (Black Moss) & side/lines: a new canadian poetics (Insomniac Press).

2002

5.75" × 7.75"; 24p.
ISBN 1-894744-13-6

Out of Print

Colophon:

Printed on acid-free 80lb Pastelle Text, the cover on 70lb Fabriano Ingres with Fabriano Ingres flyleafs; hand-stitched with archival linen thread.

Limited to 100 numbered copies, all signed by the author.

not knowing spanish

Andy Weaver

¶ Andy Weaver's collection registers a new force to be reckoned with in contemporary Canadian writing. Reminiscent of a long tradition in Canadian poetry, from Cohen and Purdy, to Ondaatje and Kroetsch, Andy Weaver explores masculine-positioned desire with terse humour and subtle wit. In an unaffected voice, Weaver has created a series of poems that speaks directly to that old ironic heart, with all the twang and bravado of a well-worn country singer. One of the most stunning qualities of this work, however, is Weaver's acrobatic use of form. From Haiku-like precision to palindromes, from narrative to prose poems, from blazon to blues, not knowing spanish bears witness to the formal command, range, heart, soul and intelligence of a new name in Canadian writing.

Andy Weaver was born in Saint John, New Brunswick, and grew up there, Ottawa, Ontario, and in small towns outside of Edmonton, Alberta. During his MA, he served on the poetry editorial board of The Fiddlehead, and was co-founder and poetry editor of Qwerty magazine. Weaver's poetry has been published in numerous magazines and anthologies, and his first full length collection, were the bees, was published by NeWest Press in 2005.

2002

5.375" × 7.75"; 36p.
ISBN 1-894744-13-6

Out of Print

Colophon:

Printed on acid-free 80lb Pastelle Text, the cover on 70lb Fabriano Ingres with Fabriano Ingres endsheets; hand-stitched with archival linen thread.

Limited to 100 numbered copies, all signed by the author.

High Design Refit

Stephen Bett

¶ From a mock-play-by-play of a roadside brawl, complete with an unnervingly detailed view of the streetscape, to a casual yet thorough consideration of the possibilities of snowboarder porn-wear, Stephen Bett's High Design Refit takes a straight-edge to the oddities of contemporary life, both reveling in and tearing to bits the inanity of the everyday. Bett is “noted for his experimental language poems and his quirky takes on 'postmodern' life.... He happily gores contemporary jargon and pretension... [in] those jazzy riffs on contemporary life that I have been citing with considerable pleasure” (Journal of Canadian Poetry). High Design Refit is a scathing and hilarious romp through the frivolous horrors of actually paying attention to what's going on around us.

Stephen Bett has had three books of poetry published — High Maintenance, Cruise Control (both Ekstasis Editions) and Lucy Kent and other poems (Longspoon Press), along with the chapbook Trader Poets (Frog Hollow Press). His work has also appeared in over 60 journals in Canada, the U.S., England, Australia, and Finland, as well as in two anthologies, and on radio. His latest collection, High-Maintenance, was published by Ekstasis Editions in 2003. He is a member of the English Department at Langara College in Vancouver, and lives with his wife and two children in Deep Cove.

2002

5.625" × 7.375"; 20pp.
ISBN 1-894744-10-1

Out of Print

Colophon:

Printed on 80lb Gilbert Text (deckled), the cover on Stonehenge White (trimmed) with Canford "Forest" endsheets (trimmed); hand-stitched with archival linen thread.

Limited to 100 numbered copies, all signed by the author.

Twilight Suites

Aaron Peck

¶ Aaron Peck's sequence is an extended exploration caught between two frames of each moment it addresses, shaping its lines as identity is shaped. Both meditative and precise, shifting from a view of object to the impact of that viewing, Twilight Suites captures the attempt to examine the process of discovery, of understanding, focusing on the intimate recognition of both the profound and the everyday. Peck's interest in the sensual is here matched by his concern with language. Drawing on influences as diverse as George Oppen and Jacques Derrida, Twilight Suites represents the effort to capture the elusive texture and cadense of moments both simple and intense. Lyrical and yet complex, the poems in this collection are jarring in their attempt to speak the layered and difficult project of making sense of each precarious moment.

Aaron Peck is the author of the chapbook Crepuscule on Mission Street (Nomados, 2006). His novel, The Bewilderments of Bernard Willis, is forthcoming with Pedlar Press. He frequently writes about art; reviews and articles have recently appeared in Fillip, and Canadian Art, and with Adam Harrison he co-edits the online art magazine, Doppelganger. He lives in New York City where he is currently pursuing a PhD.

2002

ISBN 0-9685357-9-8

Out of Print

Colophon:

Printed on acid-free 80lb Pastelle Text, the cover on 135lb Stonehenge; hand-stitched with dark blue flyleaves.

Limited to 100 numbered copies, all signed by the author.

Getaway Girl

Laisha Rosnau

¶ From Greenboathouse's home in Vernon, then to India and back, Laisha Rosnau's first collection of poems documents the travels both geographical and personal of one of our home-grown best. In conjunction with the release of Laisha's debut novel, The Sudden Weight of Snow (M&S), we're proud to introduce this intimate and exhilarating selection of poems by one of Western Canada's hottest new writers.

Laisha Rosnau's first novel The Sudden Weight of Snow (McClelland & Stewart 2002) has been called "fresh, original, funny, and rife with insight" (Toronto Star). Her Greenboathouse chapbook, getaway girl (2002) has been hailed as "poetry I can actually understand" (Laisha's mom). Though Rosnau grew up in the birthplace of Greenboathouse books, neither book has anything to do with Vernon. Honestly. She lives in Vancouver most of the time, where she is battling with a second novel. A full-length collection of her poetry, Notes on Leaving, was released by Nightwood Editions in March 2004.

2002

5.25" × 7.125"; 32pp.
ISBN 0-9685357-8-X

Out of Print

Colophon:

Printed on acid-free 80lb Pastelle Text (deckled), the cover on Stonehenge "Fawn" (trimmed) with Canford "Plum" endsheets (deckled); hand-stitched with archival linen thread.

By far, the ugliest book we ever made (our apologies to Laisha).

Limited to 100 numbered copies, all signed by the author.

Sardines

Sara Cassidy

¶ Exploring subjects from travel to treeplanting, family to new motherhood, these short-short stories slip in and out of moments both intimate and everyday. Cassidy's language is fresh and vital, yet fluid enough to camouflage the intricate work going on behind the scenes.

¶ Packed together into her follow-up chapbook to Ultrasound of My Heart (Reference West), between the organic textures and metallic edges of these condensed yet subtle stories, Cassidy's new work is filled with a precarious detail and generosity that leave the reader both stunned and eager for more.

Sara Cassidy is the author of the chapbook Ultrasound of My Heart (Reference West), whose writing has appeared in CV2, Qwerty, and Grain. She is a winner of the Writers' Federation of Nova Scotia's 'Atlantic Writing Competition,' and has been a delegate to the BC Festival of the Arts 'Otherwords' colloquium. Before her second child came along, Sara also published a bimonthly 'zine of local poetry called Bloom. Check out her website: www.saracassidywriter.com

2002

5.75" × 6.725"; 32pp.
ISBN 0-9685357-6-3

Out of Print

Colophon:

First Printing: Printed on 25% Cotton St James White, the cover on Stonehenge White with translucent blue endsheets; hand-stitched with archival linen thread. Faux spine. Limited to 45 numbered copies; 1 copy bound in boards for the author's mother.

Summer 2001.

Second Printing: Printed on 25% Cotton St James White, the cover on Stonehenge White with translucent blue endsheets; hand-stitched with archival linen thread. Limited to 100 numbered copies, all signed by the author.

On the Couch of Dr. Daydream

Harold Rhenisch

A selection of Shakespeare's sonnets, re-constructed by BC writer Harold Rhenisch.

¶ Prepare thyself. This is not your average Shakespeare. Manic, raunchy, even nasty at times, you definitely won't find these adaptations in your Norton edition.

¶ In this brief selection of Shakespeare's sonnets (Harold actually re-worked all 154 of them!) Rhenisch tears the guts out of these canonical classics, scraping out their insides and spreading them across the page. Twisting and re-shaping the originals into something entirely new, Rhenisch's translations, despite the practically blasphemous liberties taken, manage, somehow, to retain the direction and (often scathing) precision of the poems' original (snicker) potency.

Harold Rhenisch holds a degree in Creative Writing from the University of Victoria (1980), where he studied with Robin Skelton, Charles Lillard, P.K. Page and W.D. Valgardson. He is the author of 8 books of poetry, including Taking the Breath Away (Ronsdale), The Blue Mouth of Morning (Oolichan), and Fusion (Exile). His first novel, Carnival, was published by Porcupine's Quill in 2000.

2001

5.75" × 6.625"; 14 Pp.
ISBN 0-9685357-7-1

Out of Print

Colophon:

Printed on 24lb "Gunmetal" Parchment, the cover on Stonehenge "Grey" with black endsheets; hand-stitched with cotton thread. Faux spine.

Limited to an edition of 75 numbered copies, all signed by the author.

Black Horses, Cobalt Suns

John Lent

“... those horses moving out of us, coming from within, and those suns coming right at us, out of the things that brush up against us in the dusk ... those moments of unconsciousness that breathe by themselves and bless us in some fashion we cannot name.”

from the prologue

“John Lent's new poem sequence has been well worth waiting for. Black Horses, Cobalt Suns is his first all verse collection since Frieze (Thistledown, 1984) and, as he explains in the intimate, exploratory 'prologue,' is itself a 're-envisioning of an earlier cycle.' Vision is the central concern in this rigorously honest yet gently persuasive exploration of art, life, and 'even the comforting illusion of redemption.' Like the great modernists Yeats and Eliot before him, Lent here attempts to reconcile the knowable and unknowable aspects of a contemporary world. His sensitive and self-mocking conclusion partakes briefly of both: ('We all know these things. But knowing them and being them are two different suns maybe.')”

—Allan Brown

John Lent is the author of several books of poetry and fiction including Wood Lake Music (Harbour), Frieze, The Face in the Garden, and Monet's Garden (all Thistledown).

2001

7.1" × 5.75"; 24pp.
ISBN 0-9685357-3-9

Out of Print

Colophon:

First Printing: Printed on 70lb Genesis "Milkweed," the cover on Stonehenge "Fawn" with "Fluorescent Blue" endsheets; stapled. Faux spine.

Second Printing: Printed on 24lb "Antique" Parchment, the cover on Stonehenge "Fawn" with Canford "Cobalt" endsheets; hand-stitched with cotton thread. Faux spine.

Aerwacol

Sean Dixon

“This play began with a single word, found many years ago in an Anglo Saxon dictionary: Aerwacol means 'early awake.' It was, I thought, beautiful, and it made me wonder who might have been up so early all those centuries ago, and why, and what was on her mind, that she would have spoken such a word for the first time. If it were practical to perform a play outdoors at sunrise, instead of at sunset, I would chose for Aerwacol to be performed in such a way, since it begins in darkness and moves steadily towards the light.”

—Sean Dixon

¶ Aerwacol was originally performed during the summer of 2000 at the Belfry Theatre in Victoria, followed by a tour to outdoor stages in Toronto and Vancouver by Theatre SKAM.

Sean Dixon is a graduate of the acting section of the National Theatre School and a founding member of the Winnipeg theatre troupe PRIMUS. Sean's book, AWOL: Three Plays for Theatre SKAM, was recently published by Coach House Press.

2001

5.75" × 7.325"; 72 pp.
ISBN 0-9685357-5-5

Out of Print

Colophon:

First Printing: Printed on 70lb Genesis "Husk," the cover on 80lb Linen Grey Cover with 60lb Fraser Brights Electric Blue endsheets; saddle-stitched. Faux spine. This edition produced in conjunction with Theatre SKAM; 100 unnumbered copies.

Second Printing: Printed on 24lb "Natural" Parchment, the cover on Stonehenge "Fawn" with Canson "Navy" endsheets; hand-stitched with cotton thread. Faux spine.

moving pictures

Anthony Schrag

"Moving Pictures is a series of love poems in which the beloved is by turns the self, another, and the world of calcium, carbon and dust to which we're all indentured. Self-elegies, perhaps, because running through these spare and subtly cadenced lyrics is a deep sense of the body as a site of erosion, change, unbecoming that is not exactly loss...I like their sadness and their wonder."

-Suzanne Buffam

 "The dozen or so poems which make up this intimate, yet objectively shaped set, are introduced in the title piece as an alternation between the abstract claim that 'we'll metamorphose overtime' and a personal urge to the precision of 'small sounds, the // scratching of mice against a heater clicking // with bubbled air.' The two modes continue to maintain themselves, and the reader is happily jostled between universal and particular - the 'mess of visible information' as Schrag will finally call it - throughout the book."

-Allan Brown

2000

5.75" × 4.4"; 28p.
ISBN 0-9685357-4-7

Out of Print

Colophon:

Printed on 70lb Genesis, the cover on 233lb Stonehenge with Fabriano Ingres flyleafs; hand-stitched with cotton thread. This edition constructed with faux spine.

Limited to 100 numbered copies, all signed by the author.

Géricault's Severed Limbs Paintings

Jason Dewinetz

¶ A long poem based on the French Romantic artist Theodore Géricault and the figural studies leading to his famous painting "The Raft of the Medusa" of the early 19th century. Blending and drifting between biographical and historical research on the painter and the present day narrator's reflection on a turbulent relationship, Dewinetz writes an examination of intimacy and obsession, working towards an understanding of the conflict between desire and possession, both of beauty and of knowledge.

“I love what Dewinetz doesn't have to say here, too; the way it all opens up into his 'lip's wet fiction.' The precision of the voice is big.”

—John Lent

“Dewinetz is a scholar as well as an artist, and the intellectual power of his long poem is as evident and as demanding as its expression is deceptively simple. He is concerned here to demonstrate how critical ideas can help shape and support creative insights, as well as being vivified by them. This extended anecdote of the creative process is a knowledgeable exploration of the sources and shape of knowledge itself.”

—Allan Brown

1999

5.25" × 4.5"; 32pp.
ISBN 0-9685357-8-X

Out of Print

See the updated second edition here...

Colophon:

Printed on acid-free 80lb Pastelle Text (deckled), the cover on Stonehenge “Fawn” (trimmed) with Canford “Plum” endsheets (deckled); hand-stitched with archival linen thread.

Unknown number of copies printed, all signed by the author.

Into the Blue

Karen Six

¶ A series of poems examining the vulnerabilities and anxieties of our privileged and precarious Western lives. Through travel and new motherhood, the poet looks back on her own childhood, finding there not a threatening doubt, but rather a freeing acceptance of uncertainty.

1999

5.75" × 4.3"; 28pp.
ISBN 0-9685357-0-4

Out of Print

Colophon:

Printed on 24lb "Antique Parchment," the cover on 233lb Stonehenge, with a translucent purple flyleaf; hand-stitched with cotton thread.

50+/- copies produced.

The Greenboathouse Reader

Edited and with an Introduction by Jason Dewinetz

¶ The book that began Greenboathouse Books; this collection of poetry and short fiction by writers participating in our first annual reading series is what started it all. Rushed together at the last minute, The Greenboathouse Reader was an essential collection of Okanagan writers, as well as other BC poets, including Harold Rhenisch and Sharon Thesen, who contributed pieces inspired by their experiences in the Okanagan Valley.

1999

8.5" × 5.3"; 64pp.
ISBN 0-9685357-1-2

Out of Print

Colophon:

Printed on 24lb "Antique Parchment," the cover on generic construction paper, with black flyleaves of the same.

Roughly 100 copies produced.