The 2014 Governor General’s Award Winners
It's old news, we know, but we're still thrilled that LITERARY PRESS GROUP has won the 2014 Governor General’s Awards for Poetry and Drama! Congratulations to Arleen Paré, author of Lake of Two Mountains(Poetry) and Jordan Tannahill, author Age of Minority: Three Solo Plays(Drama). From BRICK BOOKS:
Lake of Two Mountains (ISBN 9781926829876), Arleen Paré’s second poetry collection, is a portrait of a lake, of a relationship to a lake, of a network of relationships around a lake. It maps, probes and applauds the riparian region of central Canadian geography that lies between the Ottawa and the St. Lawrence Rivers. The poems portray this territory, its contested human presences and natural history: the 1990 Oka Crisis, Pleistocene shifts and dislocations, the feather-shaped Ile Cadieux, a Trappist monastery on the lake’s northern shore. As we are drawn into experience of the lake and its environs, we also enter an intricate interleaving of landscape and memory, a reflection on how a place comes to inhabit us even as we inhabit it.
flint-dark far-off sky on the move across the lake slant sheets closing in sky collapsing from its bowl shoreline waiting taut stones dark as plums
~from “Distance Closing In”
Praise for Lake of Two Mountains:
“When has a body of water said so much, been looked at so many ways, spoken in so many voices? Arleen Paré’s “lake” is an astonishing creation, alive and changeable, as multifaceted as light on water. “Lake of Two Mountains” is a literal place, yes, but it is also a place with spiritual, personal, religious and political dimensions. A kind of all-seeing deity, it observes human life and measures the passing of time. I am in awe of this lake, its reach and complexities rooted in the specifics of flora and fauna. I am also in awe of Paré’s marvelous and deeply authentic poems. —Patricia Young
“Arleen Paré’s poems are monastic prayers of forgiveness, intense simplicities that praise all we have lost, all we have left. She is a gift the world has given us. Read her and then in deep quiet read her again.” —Patrick Lane
From PLAYWRIGHTS CANADA PRESS:
Three of Jordan Tannahill’s fresh and riveting works are featured in this collection, including Get Yourself Home Skyler James, Peter Fechter: 59 Minutes, and rihannaboi95.
Based on a true story, Get Yourself Home Skyler James follows the harrowing journey of a young lesbian who defects from the army when she is outed by fellow soldiers. Peter Fechter: 59 Minutes chronicles the last hour of Peter Fechter’s life, a teenager in East Berlin shot while attempting to cross the Berlin Wall in 1962 with his companion. Finally, the award-winning rihannaboi95 centres around a Toronto teen whose world comes crashing in when YouTube videos of him dancing to songs by his favourite pop heroine go viral. Together these solo plays explore the lives of three queer youth and their resilience in the face of violence and intolerance.
“…one of Canada’s most promising young independent theatre artists.”—Alison Broverman,Toronto Star
Check out a performance of rihannaboi95 on YouTube. Owais Lightwala is Sunny in this viral play, produced by Suburban Beast.