Assiniboia

(Paperback)

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Description

From Governor General's Award-winning poet Tim Lilburn comes a new collection of poetry of great scope and ambition. Assiniboia is a richly textured imagining of a Western Canada that could have been. Theatrical, operatic -- a masque and a pair of choral performances -- the book breaks new formal ground in Canadian poetry. The huge spectacle of Tim Lilburn's eighth collection gives us a new land peopled by figures from the visionary governments of Louis Riel and from the western mysticism, as well as land forms with the power of speech, all acting together as a kind of ghostly army bent on overturning more than a century of colonial practice.

Reviews

Praise for Tim Lilburn:

"Lilburn's work is richly figurative, but firmly rooted in colloquial speech. He is not only a virtuoso at the linguistic level, taking risks with metaphor and line, but also steeped in a metaphysics of place."
Jury citation, Governor General's Award

"His long dense melodic lines are full of verve and snap, offering lightning changes in register and a reluctance to leave any part of speech unturned. . . ."
Globe and Mail

"Striking and original. . . . [Lilburn captures] the mystical and ecstatic moments when self and world are united."
Booklist

"Tim Lilburn brings us face to face with the beguiling, bewildering strangeness of the world."
The Fiddlehead

"One of our more thoughtful and inventive poets."
Quill & Quire

Author Bio

TIM LILBURN is the author of seven previous books of poetry, including To the River, Kill-site, and Orphic Politics. His work has received the Governor General's Award and the Saskatchewan Book of the Year Award, among other prizes. Lilburn is also the author of two essay collections, Living in the World as if It Were Home and Going Home, and edited two other collections on poetics. He teaches at the University of Victoria.