The Jane Day Reader: An August assembly...of books

Tuesday, July 28, 2009

An August assembly...of books

When I was younger and earnest-er, by this time of year I would have already bought all my English uni texts and read through them.

By the time I was back at uni four years ago, picking up a few English honours courses with the idea of turning my on-the-side three year English degree into a slightly-more-functional four year English degree, I was lucky to get through them at all, enmeshed in my job, the Banff Centre's Wired Writing Studio, and a variety of freelance commitments.

The Book of Secrets of Albertus Magnus of the Virtues of Herbs, Stones and Certain Beasts also A Book of the Marvels of the World. Eds Michael Best & Frank Brightman (Oxford University Press, 1974)

A Medieval Bestiary w/wood engravings by Gillian Tyler by T.J. Elliott (Godine, 1971)

Royal Persian Manuscripts Ed. by Stuart Cary Welch (Thames and Hudson, 1976)

Little Books for Cooks: Mushrooms (Andrews and McMeel, 1997)

How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading by Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren (Simon & Schuster, 1972)

Reversed Forecast by Nicola Barker (Faber & Faber, 1994)

The Ghost Road by Pat Barker (Penguin 1995)

Edison & The Electric Chair: A Story of Light and Death by Mark Essig (McClelland & Stewart, 2003)

I'm not feeling sentimental for my younger days or even the year before Aa was born, precisely, because I still get heaps and piles of reading done and I have the great good fortune to have my reading subsidized by my job at Aqua Books, but I sort of miss long hot August mornings with nothing to do but pre-read my uni texts...

(Except even then I envied those people who didn't have to get summer jobs.)

Anyways, this long hot nearly-August intro was meant to set up a post about the excellent stack of books I've managed to snag recently at Aqua, the second-hand bookstore where I work...

In terms of my selections, my personal opinion is that you can never have too many woodcuts and translations from the Latin of fanciful creatures, UK-based authors named Barker, and gorgeous gold-embossed Persian illustrations.

It should go without saying that you can never have too many mushrooms.

Also, I would like to note what a relief it was to FINALLY source Edisonia from Aqua. I mean, what would it look like if I got all my research materials elsewhere? Like I'd been cheating on my bookstore, that's what it would have looked like.

Finally, having just been assigned a book for review, I'm looking forward to cross-reading how I SHOULD be reading it.

Fun!

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Praise for GUSH

"GUSH is a letter to the world declaring that feminists everywhere are ready to take back the period and claim it for ourselves." —Courtney Dickson in Herizons.

"I expect GUSH will be nonetheless passed around classrooms, as well as book clubs, women’s centres, office towers and break rooms. And I hope this sharing and the conversations that no doubt ensue are not hushed and tittering. I hope teachers, counsellors, parents and partners bookmark pages, highlight passages and display the book on prominent shelves." —Katherine J. Barrett in Understorey.

"We love GUSH!"—Open Sesame Bookstore, Kitchener.

Praise for Stowaways

Winner of the 2015 Lansdowne Prize for Poetry / Prix Lansdowne de Poesie at the Manitoba Book Awards.

"Stowaways is well imagined and well crafted, each poem tight, the poet’s attention evident. From wildlife to the clutter of the everyday to “how-to” offerings, the reader is charmed and enticed by the poet’s light touch and sure pen. Images jump out at us, grab us by the throat, leave us gasping. Ariel Gordon’s second collection is as strong as the parts of its sum.” —Margaret Michele Cook, Katia Grubisic, and Paul Savoie, judges of the 2015 Lansdowne Prize for Poetry.

"Stowaways is a clever and often hilarious collection with its
occasional tenderness let slip amidst a clearly unromantic stance and matter-of-fact prairie landscape. With its freshness of metaphor and crazy juxtapositions, its ironic and often comic twists in narrative, Stowaways is a collection that will hold readers' eyes and play with their wits to the end."—Gillian Harding-Russell, The Goose.

"Though the cover copy promises poems that are 'smart and gorgeously funny' — and they do have those qualities — Ariel Gordon’s voice is more than that. Sometimes within a single poem, she gives us laugh-out-loud humour followed by a poignant smack across the head." —Kimmy Beach, Canadian Poetries.

"Adept and assured, Stowaways swaggers." —Jonathan Ball, Winnipeg Free Press.

"The poems in this collection grapple with both the wild and the mundane, the animalistic nature of nature and relentless responsibilities of parenthood." —Mark Sampson, Free Range Reading.

"Ariel Gordon’s Stowaways offers a scrapbook of extraordinary everydayness. Its poems decoupage tender snapshots beside snappy comebacks. Fairy tale moments foment against ailing skin. Sly instructions for loving smash into slovenly destructions of living. A beautiful, gluey mess of memory, decay, and dreams!" —Kevin Mcpherson Eckhoff

"In the closing poem of Stowaways, the surviving pilot of the first fatal plane crash in recorded history receives a small box of debris from the calamity, 'to amuse him in his convalescence.' What a fitting figure for this collection's loopy juxtapositions and serious surprises. The world in Ariel Gordon's poems is one in which everything and everyone, from a sleep-starved human mother to a miscegenational beluga, is simultaneously endangered and dangerous. If Gordon understands our vulnerability, how 'skin is a thin shield,' that even a birthday balloon, drifting from the back seat is 'a kiss with teeth,' she vividly reminds us that those teeth are ours: 'If I had had twins,' says the new mother in "Primpara," "I would have eaten one.' These are nervy poems that refuse to behave themselves. They are something to celebrate." —Julie Bruck

Praise for Hump

Winner of the 2011 Lansdowne Prize for Poetry / Prix Lansdowne de Poesie at the Manitoba Book Awards.

"The focus of Hump is the rich experience of motherhood and marriage on the one hand, and of city life in the integrated context of the natural world, which is everywhere engaging, fierce, beautiful, and unstoppable. This is capable, exuberant writing, at once passionate and meticulous. Hump is a worthy first book indeed." —Michael Harris, Kenneth Meadwell, and Serge Patrice Thibodeau, jurors for the 2011 Aqua Books Lansdowne Prize for Poetry.

“Ariel Gordon is superbly, supremely, a poet of the body. She finds words for the physicality of the forest, of the garden, of pregnancy. Hump speaks the erotics of being alive and being in love with being alive.” —Robert Kroetsch.

"Brimming with finely crafted poems that thrum with life and love, Hump is indeed a very promising debut." —Fiona Timwei Lam, Contemporary Verse 2.

“Not so much sweetness and light, Gordon channels Adrienne Rich's dichotomy of love and frustration with her realism.” —Zanna Joyce, Winnipeg Free Press.

"If you don't know Ariel's work, I can recommend her book Hump, which I keep on my bedside table, along with all my stuff on LOST EXPLORERS and CASTAWAYS and HELLISH SIEGES, as things to pick up and simply open and starting reading anywhere, which is the pretty much the best review a book can get." —Darryl Joel Berger.

"The beauty of this collection is the love of the mother for her child, that relationship that the childfree will never experience. But the beauty is hidden slyly in the gorgeous lines that free themselves when needed from the details of the grime, the blood, the leaking breasts, and the mundane sleeplessness of parenting-turned poetry." —Kimmy Beach, Canadian Poetries

“Hump is gentle and sly, but also as sharp as baby teeth and poison mushrooms. And it’s called Hump.” —Quentin Mills-Fenn, Uptown Magazine.

Origin Story

Why is my name Ariel Gordon and this blog entitled The Jane Day Reader, you ask?

Well, my middle names are Jane and Day, after my grandmothers, Ade Augusta Rooseboom (who was called Day Laban after she married my grandfather and moved to Canada) and Anna Vida Mary Barrett-Hamilton (who became Jane Gordon after her immigration and later marriage).

When I was fourteen, I seriously contemplated using "Jane Day Gordon" or "J.D. Gordon" as my pen name. And then realized that there was no point in having an alternate identity in no-degrees-of-separation Winnipeg.

As a grown-up compromise, I started using 'janeday' as the username for my email and then for the name of this blog, which I started reluctantly and never expected to enjoy...

(I also gave my daughter another version of my grandmothers' names...)