New Releases by Phil Hall

WINNER OF THE 75th GOVERNOR GENERAL'S LITERARY AWARD FOR POETRY WINNER OF THE 25th TRILLIUM BOOK PRIZE WINNER OF AN ALCUIN AWARD FOR DESIGN SHORTLISTED FOR THE GRIFFIN POETRY PRIZE These are poems of critical thought that have been influenced by old fiddle tunes. These are essays that are not out to persuade so much as ruminate, invite, accrue. Hall is a surruralist (rural & surreal), and a terroir-ist (township-specific regionalist). He offers memories of, and homages to -- Margaret Laurence, Bronwen Wallace, Libby Scheier, and Daniel Jones, among others. He writes of the embarrassing process of becoming a poet, and of his push-pull relationship with the whole concept of home. His notorious 2004 chapbook essay The Bad Sequence is also included here, for a wider readership, at last. It has been revised. (It's teeth have been sharpened.) In this book, the line is the unit of composition; the reading is wide; the perspective personal: each take a give, and logic a drawback. Language is not a smart-aleck; it's a sacred tinkerer. Readers are invited to watch awe become a we. In Fred Wah's phrase, what is offered here is "the music at the heart of thinking."

This new updated edition provides a wide range of interviews with filmmakers, distributors, festival programmers, marketing experts, and critics, taking the reader deep into the process of positioning a film for distribution.

Lochloosa Lake, a place of daunting mystery and critical uncertainties, is about to overflow. As the gator infested water rises, so does the haunting that lurks just beneath the surface. The great dam of the unknown is about to burst pouring ages of hidden secrets into the present. When Ray comes face to face with its unearthed truth, will he be prepared for what comes next? More importantly, will you?

A book of poems like an Alexander Calder mobile, or a Jean Tingley sculpture. The critical mind has been replaced by an open invitation. The Little Seamstress is breath. Sad breath growing down. May guck turn regal!

From the flickering silent images of the nickelodeon to the roaring vibrancy of today's digital video productions, independent cinema has always challenged the way films are created, released and viewed. The History of Independent Cinema presents an extraordinary journey that revisits the innovative men and women who stood up to the status quo and brought revolutionary new ideas and technologies to the motion picture world. The History of Independent Cinema celebrates the pioneers who introduced color, sound, widescreen projection and videography to the filmmaking process. You will meet the brave individuals who tore down racial and gender barriers behind the camera, challenged censorship taboos imposed on film production, formulated new strategies for film distribution, and created many of the greatest movies ever made. Spanning the full spectrum of the U.S. film experience, The History of Independent Cinema is a tribute to the legendary filmmakers and landmark films that reshaped - and continue to reshape - American popular culture.

Everyone's heard of public relations, but what exactly is it? Even among PR professionals, there's no real consensus. New technologies, new media, and new corporate thinking have caused even more confusion. The New PR: An Insider's Guide to Changing the Face of Public Relations explores the changing face of public relations, with its dramatic shift away from the hoary concept of media relations into sophisticated marketing strategies. Phil Hall draws on his experience as the head of one of New York's savviest PR agencies to offer a no-holds-barred examination of what works, what doesn't, and why -- with the goal of helping readers secure high-impact results. Dispensing with the myth of traditional media, Hall shows why virtual and experiential marketing are today's most effective messengers. Refreshingly free of dull theory and convoluted language, this entertaining, eminently useful handbook shows readers how PR really works and how to get the most bang for their PR buck.

Two porcupines walk into a bar. No, wait. One porcupine walks into a bar. Well, actually, it's a poet. And he walks into a library. He opens books and shakes them until they look like porcupines dancing. He is looking for old photos to eat. He likes the salt taste of the chemicals. Chewing, he crawls oot. Toying with the confessional, Phil Hall's White Porcupine is a self-portrait of the artist from ages fifty to fifty-four. The creature of the title suggests (as in White Buffalo, White Whale, White Moose) the sacred primitive wild...though small...(a bit like poems); also, Death Itself (bugga-bugga); and snow rushing at the window of a moving car, years ago...tire-chains...fins; and greying hair, stubble chin; and honestly who doesn't bristle about getting old? and young St Sebastian, that doofus...naked, glowing, multi-skewered; and a black and white group photo outside a one room school house in winter...(there's mom!) each student a quill, with its name underneath. The punchline: White Porcupine is a long border-line-incomprehensible confessional poem about being miserable (oh boy!). Well, really it's about being a poet (even better!). Or, is it?

The title of An Oak Hunch comes from one of the sequences in this five-sequence book of poems: Phil Hall's homage to a poetic mentor, Al Purdy. Its subtitle is "Essay on Purdy," and these highly original, highly personal takes on the poetry and the life of Al Purdy "essay" in the root sense of the word: attempt or probe. The other four sequences, "The Interview," "Mucked Rushes," "Gang Pluck" and "Index of First Lines" are also probes, each of a different sort, written in a language that stretches the denotative values of words. Phil Hall is as leftist as he ever was, but his recent books like Trouble Sleeping have also been adventures in language. His writing shines with a new economy reminiscent of that of some of the so-called "language poets." Sometimes the poems of An Oak Hunch carry a narrative, sometimes they are leaping and lyrical, but they are all composed of word-music that connects the ear and the heart. Saying the old, chipped words, I liked to think I was helping them pray too-words don't know how to read, books don't know how to read-they need my weak eyes-I thought, like some missionary to island lepers-but I was the one banished to an island-and the words were the missionaries-I am the one with these stinking wounds in the palms of my hands-these gifts?-my articulate hands that can not make straight arrows. From "Index of First Lines," Section V of An Oak Hunch

Unlike most independent films, undergrounds roll far from traditional filmmaking circles. With micro-budgets that couldn't cover a day's catering on typical Hollywood films, these productions challenge audiences with bold content and audacious visuals that make cineplex fare taste like stale popcorn.

Chronologically organized, this reference offers a visual history of more than 650 wonderful experimental machines, starting with the Buick Y-Job dream car of the 1930s to the 2002 fuel-cell-propelled cars and light-duty trucks.

The complete story of Chevrolet in NASCAR competition. Foreword by three-time NASCAR Winston Cup champion Darrell Waltrip. More than 400 photos, most in color. Behind-the-scenes photos from Chevy and NASCAR archives. Statistics on drivers that have won in Chevrolets.

"If only my cousin had kept off me, kept out of me his brown fly-strop glue, his shot dog-eye cream. Afterwards, he would comb my hair to a wet Elvis point between my eyes and warn me what his wolves would do to me, and where I'd be sent, if I ever told." This experience is at the core of Phil Hall's Trouble Sleeping. It is the source of bad dreams and also, paradoxically, the source of his crisp, luminous text. Trouble Sleeping makes visible the poetry of hopeful despair by remembering a poor working class family of Irish descent, living outside the margins of respectability at the edge of the Laurentian Shield in mid-Northern Ontario in the 1950s. This raw world is seen by a child who is a misfit in it (especially among its brutal, drunken males). That child will eventually come to speak for the plight of unregarded misfits in society at large. "Orthodontics is a class issue" to the writer looking back on a time when it never occurred to his parents that crooked teeth might be fixed - not that they could have afforded it. In Trouble Sleeping, working a variation on the Japanese form of haibun, Hall alternates prose passages with poems that reflect nightmarishly on the interwoven narratives.

"whatever words meant/has filligreed & transmutated" writes Phil Hall; his new Brick book marks an important shift in his writing. The fascinating leaps of Hall's language in Hearthedral may be a surprise to readers familiar with his other work, but his uncompromising honesty, his willingness to face sorrow and self remain constant. What emerges is profound and beautiful, difficult and homely: a "folk-hermetic."

A sequence of poems probing an inner return to a tenuous home; another gathered around an armature of poetics; a third insinuating poetry into political oppression: The Unsaid shares the fierce honest precision that Phil Hall's poetry is well known for. All of his poems open their palms to the reader, no matter how personal and painful the haunts that produced them. The private becomes public, the solitary becomes community, in words meant to be of use as they expose what is mentally crippling when it goes unsaid.

Phil Hall is well known as a writer and supporter of "work poetry." He stands in solidarity with workers, with the little guy, the often faceless many. His poetry can be fierce in their service, but it is sponsored by humane inquiry, not dogma. Amanuensis takes its title from a poem about ghostwriting, and the image plays teasingly over the whole volume. The language of this poetry, often spare and yet astonishingly sensuous, springs from mysterious though not supernatural sources in commonplace experience approached with reverence. Followers of Phil Hall's work will welcome the appearance in Amanuensis of a selection of his terrific workplace drawings.

Why I Haven't Written takes Phil Hall back to Ontario roots in family immediate and extended, and on again into the larger world. In his beautifully-controlled poems, he catches much of a life in nodes of consequence-often painful for the poet, but not for the reader. The life may have seemed ill-fitting to the one who blundered or was buffeted through much of it, but in the long run it made him compassionate and observant.