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    This World We Invented
    This World We Invented
    This World We Invented
    Ebook91 pages30 minutes

    This World We Invented

    By Carolyn Marie Souaid

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    About this ebook

    The world in Carolyn Marie Souaid’s latest collection is both an act of the imagination and a responsibility. Souaid’s poems zoom in and out, shifting focus to accommodate varied dimensions of experience. We move from the breakdown of a relationship to primordial ooze to a suicide bomb to a son doing his math homework. In a disarmingly personable voice, Souaid investigates our darker moments, faces up to losses and failures both intimate and public, often with wry humour. If our world is an imperfect invention, it is also, for Souaid, a source of wonder -- where “the trick was not to fall asleep but to notice everything / in its brevity.”
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBrick Books
    Release dateMay 1, 2015
    ISBN9781771313551
    This World We Invented
    Author

    Carolyn Marie Souaid

    Carolyn Marie Souaid has been writing and publishing poetry for over 20 years. The author of six books and the winner of the David McKeen Award for her first collection, Swimming into the Light, she has also been shortlisted for the A.M. Klein Prize and the Pat Lowther Memorial Award. Much of her work deals with the bridging of worlds; the difficulty, perhaps the impossibility of it, but the necessity of the struggle. She has toured her work across Canada and in France. Since the 1990s, she has been a key figure on the Montreal literary scene, having co-produced two major local events, Poetry in Motion (the poetry-on-the-buses project) and the Circus of Words / Cirque des mots, a multidisciplinary, multilingual cabaret focusing on the "theatre" of poetry. Souaid is a founding member and editor of Poetry Quebec, an online magazine focusing on the English language poets and poetry of Quebec.

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      Book preview

      This World We Invented - Carolyn Marie Souaid

      This

      World

      We

      Invented

      This World We Invented

      Carolyn Marie Souaid

      Brick Books

      Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

      Souaid, Carolyn Marie, 1959–, author

      This world we invented / Carolyn Marie Souaid.

      Poems.

      Issued in print and electronic formats.

      ISBN 978-1-77131-355-1

      I. Title.

      PS8587.O87T47 2015          C11’.54          C2014-907988-5

      We acknowledge the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund, and the Ontario Arts Council for their support of our publishing program.

      The author photo was taken by Endre Farkas.

      Cover image by Gts.

      Print design and layout by Marijke Friesen.

      Brick Books

      431 Boler Road, Box 20081

      London, Ontario N6K 4G6

      www.brickbooks.ca

      ABOUT THE BOOK

      The world in Carolyn Marie Souaid’s latest collection is both an act of the imagination and a responsibility. Souaid’s poems zoom in and out, shifting focus to accommodate varied dimensions of experience. We move from the breakdown of a relationship to primordial ooze to a suicide bomb to a son doing his math homework. In a disarmingly personable voice, Souaid investigates our darker moments, faces up to losses and failures both intimate and public, often with wry humour. If our world is an imperfect invention, it is also, for Souaid, a source of wonder — where the trick was not to fall asleep but to notice everything / in its brevity.

      CONTENTS

      I    SKETCHBOOK

      Scale

      Shape

      Space

      Pattern

      Figure and Ground

      Light

      Perspective

      Colour

      Chiaroscuro

      Symmetry

      Context

      Notes on Composition

      Collage

      Shadow

      II    THIS WORLD WE INVENTED

      i

      Bildungsroman

      City of Everything

      House Front

      Seagulls

      Objects of Desire

      The Holocaust Tower

      The Morning After

      Everything Reminds Me of Lolita (H. H.)

      Street Performer

      Gaping Breach of Propriety

      The Glass Half Empty

      Thoughts After Another Explosion in Aleppo

      Boy with Lego

      The Devil in the Details

      Morning with Paintbrush

      ii

      Post-mortem

      School

      Study of My Son Doing Homework

      Where Night Takes Me

      Pathology Report 1

      The Gene

      Diptych

      Pathology Report 2

      Letter to Albert

      Upon Seeing Life of Pi on the Eve of the Eve of Your Death

      The Hottest Car I Ever Drove Was a 1978 Monza with a V8 Engine and a Fuchsia Interior

      How God Looked in My Dream

      Garbage Day Meditation

      Dinner Party

      5:00 a.m. the Day of Your Mother’s Funeral

      Night Drive

      Barkwoodby

      Note, Tempera on Yellow Post-it, 76 x 76 mm (c. 2007)

      Introduction to Reiki

      Daybreak, Georgian Bay

      Watching You Do Tai Chi at Dawn

      Notes

      Acknowledgements

      Biographical Note

      for Endre

      I

      SKETCHBOOK

      Concept has form.

      —Kit White

      (from 101

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