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).

"Wah reflects on his own practice of improvisation in writing as inflected in part by his involvement as a musician with jazz, and on the origins of that practice."--

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.

Medallions of Belief is a chapbook configured on the occasion of a workshop and reading for Toronto New School of Writing titled "How to Write a Poem for the Queen." The workshop was held on Saturday, March 10, 2012. The poems are selected from past publications as well as unpublished and newer poems, and they celebrate thinking around the notion of an "occasional" poem. The poem "The Snowflake Age" was written at the request of the Speakers of the House of Commons and the Senate for Queen Elizabeth''s Diamond Jubilee.

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.

is a door includes poems generated from linguistic mindfulness, improvisation, compositional problem-solving, collaborative events, travel, investigation documentary.

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.