Shane Rhodes : excerpt from It’s Here All The Beauty I Told You About

 

 

Author’s Note:

This excerpt is from a manuscript in progress which works with one of the most popular Western pulp novels ever writ- ten—Shane (1949) by Jack Schaefer—and Western comics published in Canada from the 1940s and 1950s.

This project is deeply personal. Parts of my life could well have come from the plot of a cheap Western: I was named after Shane and come from a long line of alcoholics, farmers and ranchers. Growing up a white settler in the West means I lived most of my life in an imaginary landscape that hovered above the real. Attempting to see behind this painted screen is to try to see how Westerns (whether they be novels, movies or comics, old or new) continue to obscure and rewrite the history of North American colonization and settlement and the racism that fuels them. It’s Here All The Beauty I Told You About tries to unravel some of this, and see how settler stories of the Great Plains function within the larger apparatus of colonial mythmaking.

 

 

 

 

 

This is occupation
I said, square by square, song
By song. 

We held each other
As we had asked to be
In the exit interview, 

Our shirts buttoned

So they’d remain fastened

As we passed over the nail strips 

Laid across the highway.|
The restrictions
Of the authorizations 

We issued, were issued, our bodies
Lit by the soft
Searchlights scanning 

The fence line. I will
Endeavour, I said,
To be a stronger 

Citizen, my commitment
To annihilation
More true. 

*

 

A woman in a hazmat suit finds a tooth in soft, sifted shovel-fulls of dirt.

The saskatoon berries near the concession fenceline, heavy with sugar and seed.

Still surprised by the force of it, a man tears up describing the life of his mother.

On this highway, you mustn’t stop to pick up ghosts.

 

 

 

 

Shane Rhodes is the author of six books of poetry, including Dead White Men, which won the 2018 Ottawa Book Award. Shane has also won the Alberta Book Award, the P. K. Page Founder's Award for Poetry and a National Magazine Gold Award. Shane lives in Ottawa, on unceded Algonquin, Anishinabek territory.

Rebecca Rustin, Forrest Gander, Shane Rhodes, Johannes Göransson + Ellen Chang-Richardson : virtual reading series #6

a series of video recordings of contemporary poets reading from their work, prompted by the Covid-19 pandemic and subsequent cancellations, shut-downs and isolations; a reading series you can enjoy in the safety of your own protected space,

Rebecca Rustin : “when you're walking alone act crazy”

Rebecca Rustin is a freelance writer and translator in Montreal, Quebec. A chapbook Mercy Tax came out last fall with Rahila's Ghost Press, and her poems have appeared in Dusie, Train, where is the river, talking about strawberries all of the time, PRISM, and elsewhere.

Forrest Gander : “Facing in All Directions” from Torn Awake (New Directions).

Forrest Gander, writer and translator with degrees in geology and literature, was married to legendary poet CD Wright. Gander's most recent book was Be With, winner of the Pulitzer Prize. CD’s last book was Casting Deep Shade, an ecopoetic paen to beech trees.

Shane Rhodes : “Dead White Men,” and “Language of the Land Newly Discovered,” from Dead White Men, and “Farm Show”

Shane Rhodes is the author of six books of poetry, including Dead White Men (Coach House Books), which won the 2018 Ottawa Book Award. Other notable titles include Err, which was nominated for the City of Ottawa Book Award, X, which created poetry out of Canada’s post-Confederation treaties, and The Wireless Room, which won the Alberta Book Award. Shane’s poetry has also been featured in the anthologies Best Canadian Poetry, Resisting Canada and others and has been awarded the PK Page Founders Award for Poetry and a National Magazine Gold Award. Shane lives in Ottawa.

Johannes Göransson : from “Summer”

Johannes Göransson is the author of eight books, including most recently Transgressive Circulation: Essays on Translation and POETRY AGAINST ALL, as well as the translator of poets from Sweden, Finland and South Korea, including Aase Berg, Helena Boberg and Ann Jäderlund. He is the publisher of Action Books and teaches at the University of Notre Dame.

Ellen Chang-Richardson : “III.       A.” from Unlucky Fours (Anstruther Press, 2020) and “courtyard acupuncture” published February 2020 on Bywords.ca.

Ellen Chang-Richardson (ehjchang.com) is an emerging poet of Taiwanese and Cambodian-Chinese descent. Winner of the 2019 Vallum Award for Poetry, her writing has appeared in Bywords.ca, Ricepaper, Hart House Review, Cypress Press, and more. Her debut chapbook, Unlucky Fours, is now available with Anstruther Press (2020). In addition to her writing, Ellen runs Little Birds Poetry – a series of editing workshops based in Ottawa & Toronto. She currently lives in Ottawa ON with her inorganic chemist/oenologist husband and their imaginary Norwich terrier. @ehjchang