Becoming the Work — Letting Go of Separation by Laurie Burns

October, 2007
K. Louise Vincent
ISBN 978-0-9783879-0-7
5 by 8 Trade Paperback
Full colour cover
100 pages $17.95

Copyright    
Front Cover Back Cover Contents 1
Contents2 Page73 Page80
Page89 Page95 Notes

 

To order simply send us an email or use secure credit card payment through PayPal—no membership or account required.

 

The Discipline of Undressing

by K. Louise Vincent

If language is a source of imagination and inquiry, how does the discipline of love become this too? These poems reveal forms of undressing or letting go the poet hadn’t known before – a simultaneous doing, undoing and non-doing. In all she continues to explore themes of bewilderment and belonging, calling out to the witness to keep an unmasked watch.

It is rare to meet someone with such an opened heart. K. Louise is wide awake in the dark, and she writes beautifully from that deep place.
          –Mildred Tremblay

The Discipline of Undressing was a finalist for the ReLit Award for Poetry, which the Globe and Mail has called “The country’s pre-eminent literary prize recognizing independent presses.”

K. Louise Vincent’s first book of poems, Hannah and the Holy Fire, was published in 2004 with Oolichan. Other publications include Transforming Abuse: Nonviolent Resistance and Recovery (New Society Publishers, 1995) and the poetry chapbooks The Green Room (Leaf Press, 2005) and The Letter Poems (with Joanne Thorvaldson). She was born in Manitoba where the precambrian shield meets the prairie and now lives on Gabriola Island.

We are grateful to Susan Griffin for permission to use her telling of the story of Robert Desnos. Her work can be found here.

Review Excerpts

Synergy Magazine
Flying Mermaids Studio.

.. poetry is a consciousness event. It is a form of devotion, addressing, and in Gabriola Island poet K. Louise Vincent's case, undressing. ... One of my favourite poems in the collection, 'Afterworld,' begins with an epigraph from Rumi. It is full of colour — especially yellow — and then a multiplying moon with "a stream of oranges/falling and rising in the hands/of an invisible juggler." The book is lovely to hold in one's hand, its poems surrounded by lots of space. In that spacious silence, the words illuminated are conscious and exquisite. (Mary Ann Moore)

Patrick M. Pilarski

... (I don't use this phrase lightly) I was astounded. By the end of an evening's read found myself faced with one of the best volumes of poetry I have read in recent memory. I was hooked after the first poem.

The was something raw and natural about the book and the way the language played out, like a fusion of Anne Carson's unexpected and skillful word-smithing, Don McKay's sense of nature and place, and something else simply magical; perhaps the deep reflective stillness of classic Japanese verse ... if I found something as exciting as K. Louise Vincent's book every time I opened my mail box, I would be a happy man indeed! (Patrick M. Pilarski)

Read Patrick's complete review from Other Voices here
Link to Other Voices



::: home ::: about us ::: guidelines ::: get in touch ::: order ::: chapbooks :::