Découvrez The Porcupinity of the Stars, un recueil de poésie où Gary Barwin mêle mélancolie et émerveillement. Une exploration visuelle et sonore de la conscience, entre famille, perte et émerveillement face au monde.

In A Cemetery for Holes, poetic language bends and breaks, resists and reforms under the stress of family trauma. Consensual reality shifts with nonconsensual harm. It is this history of violence which is ultimately, confronted, fought against, and overcome. While engaged in this struggle, the poems also strive to rebuild, to console and to rediscover the world, its beauty, tenderness, humour, and joy.

With uncanny wit, inventive beauty, and numinous surprise, The Most Charming Creatures explores the contemporary and its language, considering our wonder, sorrow, bewilderment, anxiety, and tenderness. While these poems energize and connect and "turn the paren- / theses inside out so that / we mean everything," they are also alive to the alluring complicity of language and its duplicity and deceptions. "This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but / while we watch." A follow-up to the award-winning author's acclaimed selected poems, this new collection continues Barwin's examination of the possibilities of the poem: a celebration, a story, an investigation, a riff, a word machine, a parable, a transformation. But what are the "most charming creatures" of the title? In 1862, scientific illustrator Ernst Haeckel termed radiolarians (ancient single-celled organisms with mineral skeletons) "the most charming creatures," but here Barwin turns the microscope around to consider something just as strange and mysterious: language, our culture, and the self. From microorganisms, onion rings, grief, and Gerard Manley Hopkins to beetles, neoliberalism, sandwiches, Martin Luther, and stand-up comedy, he offers: "it's a miracle that we've survived / it's a miracle that we've survived at all."

Les Amériques ne figurent encore sur aucune carte quand Moshé décide de fuir son shtetl misérable et les pogroms qui le ravagent. Répondant à l'appel du large et de l'inconnu, le boychik de quatorze ans embarque comme moussaillon sur un navire de commerce et se retrouve bientôt en plein coeur de l'Inquisition espagnole. Commence alors une aventure rocambolesque qui le mènera à sauver les Juifs des flammes du bûcher, à voyager aux côtés d'un certain Christophe Colomb et à prendre la barre d'un bateau pirate pour découvrir, avant la puissante Armada, le secret de l'immortalité.Mais comment cette histoire vieille de cinq cents ans a-t-elle pu franchir l'abîme du temps et parvenir jusqu'à nous? Grâce à Aaron, perroquet polyglotte et éternel blagueur, qui avait élu domicile sur l'épaule de Moshé pour ne plus la quitter. C'est lui qui, depuis la maison de retraite de Floride où il coule des jours aussi heureux qu'ennuyeux, nous conte la vie de ce garçon naïf devenu marin redouté et nous guide dans cette odyssée à travers les mers et les mots. Empruntant au roman d'aventures comme au conte philosophique, Le Yiddish à l'usage des pirates est un livre déjanté où l'humour juif et le parler yiddish se marient à la langue fleurie des pirates. Dans cette satire qui dénonce l'extrémisme religieux et les persécutions qui l'accompagnent, Gary Barwin fait feu de tout bois pour souligner le pouvoir libérateur du langage et de la comédie devant l'horreur la plus absolue.

Shortlisted for the City of Hamilton book award At times comic, tender, dark, and arrestingly bizarre, Gary Barwin's latest fiction collection marvels at the strangeness, charm, and beauty that is contemporary life in the quantum world. Ranging from short story to postcard fiction, Barwin's stories are luminous, hilarious, and surprising. A billionaire falls in love with a kitchen appliance, a couple share a pair of legs, a pipeline-size hair is given the Nobel Prize only so that it can be taken away, a father remembers with tenderness the radiant happiness of his teenage child, trapped inside his body. As the Utne Reader said of his last collection, "what makes them so compelling is Barwin's balance of melancholy with wide-eyed wonder." Praise for I, Dr. Greenblatt, Orthodontist, 251-1457 "There's so much to love in I, Dr. Greenblatt, Orthodontist, 251-1457. Each story is a portal into a wondrous and mysterious parallel world. Like the great U.S. poet, Russell Edson, Gary Barwin's work inhabits a transcendent country, one in which surprise, delight, discovery, and, above all, gleeful imagination rule the day." (M.A.C. Farrant, author of The World Afloat and Darwin Alone in the Universe) "These stories are as unexpected as they are beautiful. Each one will have you seeing the world in a slightly different way." (Andrew Kaufman, author of All My Best Friends are Superheroes and Born Weird)