Emanations

Steven Ross Smith is one of the preeminent sound poets in Canada. He is also one of the few poets in Canada currently engaged in writing a life poem (a long poem that encompasses a life)--Emanations is the sixth chapter of that project.

Smith bends, confuses, and disintegrates the fundamental premises of poetic and fictive creation--working language, narrative, and meaning like sculptural material. Emanations marks Smith’s return to verse form, while being a further engagement with composition by sound and its visual placement on the page.

These poems "emanate" from specific works by other poets, including bpNichol, Sylvia Legris, Federico Garcia Lorca, and Lisa Robertson. In this charged, frenetic work, the dominant themes are nature’s precariousness, social conundrums, and poetics.

This collection will appeal to fans of highly torqued and playful language reminiscent of bpNichol’sThe Alphabet Game, Phil Hall’s Hearthedral: A Folk Hermetic, and Fred Wah’sis a door.

Praise for Emanations: Fluttertongue 6:

A superb technician of rhythm, rhyme and resonance, Smith lays everything on the table for an earth under siege from high finance, rampant human pollution, and wars of the supermarkets. His lines spill and flow like winding rivers or lapping waves laced with erotically sensuous word-scents that take us to what flutters just within and without our grasp. Aroused, we devour their prayers, their scoffs, their love songs, swept along in their amazing quilted music." --Meredith Quartermain, author ofRecipes from The Red Planet

Steven Ross Smith’s Emanations: Fluttertongue 6 both sets its own landing field and touches down, in poetry that bucks and soars. Even the hyphens dart about in this surprise-fest, this portrait of the poet as renewer and renewed.
- Gerald Hill, author of Hillsdale Book

"Steven Ross Smith’s Emanations: fluttertongue 6 "Sounds like Futurism / looks like Charades." It’s meant to provoke second-sight and attention to echoes, to what shimmers and whispers in the sensuality of sense. Herein is, oh "Poet," "a pitch of try-to-understand before dark drops." Need a guide? Look up Roy Miki and/or Samuel Beckett. You’re on to something!"
--George Elliott Clarke, Toronto’s Poet Laureate, 2002 winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry forExecution Poems