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Our copies for the launch of Phil Hall‘s The Small Nouns Crying Faith (BookThug) have arrived, just in time for tomorrow’s launch!

From 7:30PM to 9:30PM at the Atwater Library Auditorium, Phil Hall will be giving the first Montreal reading for his new book of poetry. The wonderful poet/translator Angela Carr will be hosting the event, and will be interviewing Phil about his work once the reading is over. There will be refreshments, beautiful books for sale and good company. Check this out:

Each copy of The Small Nouns Crying Faith  contains these poem leaflets by Phil Hall, entitled Faith. A considerable acquisition for any and all (CanLit) bibliophiles out there; each leaflet belongs to an 1,000-copy print run. Both the book and its included leaflet are beautifully designed with an all-Canadian design and typeface.

Who knows if we’ll have copies left over after tomorrow? And Phil Hall will be there to sign them!

Hope you can come out and enjoy the evening.

Poetry Panda-monium!: Launching Six New Poetry Titles

Sunday, May 5^th @ 7PM

The Sparrow, 5322 St. Laurent Blvd.

As a denouement to National Poetry Month, six poets from three indie presses—Montreal’s Vehicule Press, Toronto’s Coach House Books and Fredericton’s Goose Lane Editions—will be reading together in one fell swoop at The Sparrow, a beautiful bar on St. Laurent on May 5^th. The six-fold launch will include debut books and long-awaited collections from Adrienne Barrett, Andrew Faulkner, Carmelita McGrath, Robert Moore, Deena Kara Shaffer and David Seymour. Furthermore, guests are encouraged to wear black and white in honor of the Harper government’s love for the bamboo-chewing bear. Hope you can make it, as we’ll be handling the book table.

Here’s the Poetry Panda-monium line-up:

Adrienne Barrett: The first book from Adrienne Barrett, The house is still standing (Goose Lane Editions), peopled with charlatans, gingerbread men, children and savants. (The) poems deke and swerve, from the wry to the theatrical to the intimate.

Andrew Faulkner: Debut poet Andrew Faulkner will unleash Need Machine (Coach House Books), a collection of poems about hangovers, house parties, cities, syndicated television, and even baseball pitcher Roy Halladay!

Carmelita McGrath: The long awaited follow-up to McGrath’s Atlantic Poetry Prize-winning collection To the New World, Escape Velocity (Goose Land Editions) culls overlooked fragments from our domestic lives and ferries them on unpredictable journeys. A conversation with a telemarketer becomes a monologue on overcoming loss, stray animals provoke cautionary tales shared between generations of women, and junk mail fosters a meditation on necessity, debt and the inevitability of death.

Robert Moore: The fourth collection from Moore asks the question, if cows could talk, what would they say? The Golden Book of Bovinities (Vehicule Press) represents the collective wisdom of centuries of bovine self-awareness and contains some of the freshest, funniest, most startling poetry you will (have) ever read.

Deena Kara Shaffer: The debut poet’s book, The Grey Tote (Vehicule Press), is a collection of elegies on the death, in quick succession, of her father and mother. Scorning easy consolations, Shaffer’s poems are witty, epigrammatic, rhythmic, spiked with grief but ultimately dry-eyed ‘lessons in goodbye.’

David Seymour: Acclaimed poet and film industry worker David Seymour will launch For Display Purposes Only (Coach House Books), poems that pause for the spectacle: cloning technologies, super-slo-mo photography, narcotic cab rides. These poems are paeans to our facility for duplicity and self-deception, in which the act of living becomes more and more like a movie we’re not in.

Whew! What a month! April was chock full of great discussions, photo opportunities, and our annual National Poetry Sale was a big success; all thanks to you, Montreal. Now we’re into the month of May, with Kate Zambreno‘s Heroines as our new book of the month, a new book club selection, and a bunch of great events coming up. Read on for for info, or download our newsletter for May here: Argo Bookshop Newsletter – May 2013

Oh, and before we forget to mention it: Consider popping on over to the Cult #MTL (formerly Montreal Mirror) Best of Montreal 2013 voting website and vote for the Argo Bookshop as Best New Bookstore. It should only take you 5 to 10 minutes to fill out their minimum of 25 categories (Best Mexican or Best-Dressed Montrealer, for example). You can access the voting site here. Thanks for your consideration!

New & Latest Arrivals

• Snowflake & Different Streets by Eileen Myles

• A Time to Keep Silence by Patrick Leigh Fermor

• How I Wrote Certain of My Books by Raymond Roussel

• Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

• Being Numerous: Poetry and the Ground of Social Life by Oren Izenberg

• Justice for Hedgehogs by Ronald Dworkin

• 9 Algorithms That Changed the Future by John MacCormick

• Algerian Chronicles by Albert Camus

Book of the Month: 20% off Kate Zambreno’s Heroines

“I am beginning to realize that taking the self out of our essays is a form of repression. Taking the self out feels like obeying a gag order–pretending an objectivity where there is nothing objective about the experience of confronting and engaging with and swooning over literature.” – Heroines

“On the last day of December, 2009 Kate Zambreno began a blog called Frances Farmer Is My Sister… Widely reposted, Zambreno’s blog became an outlet for her highly informed and passionate rants about the fates of the modernist “wives and mistresses.” (In it,) Zambreno reclaimed the traditionally pathologized biographies of Vivienne Eliot, Jane Bowles, Jean Rhys, and Zelda Fitzgerald: writers and artists themselves who served as male writers’ muses only to end their lives silenced, erased, and institutionalized…

In Heroines, Zambreno extends the polemic begun on her blog into a (work of literary scholarship). Combing theories that have dictated what literature should be and who is allowed to write it–from T. S. Eliot’s New Criticism to the writings of such mid-century intellectuals as Elizabeth Hardwick and Mary McCarthy to the occasional “girl-on-girl crime” of the Second Wave of feminism–she traces the genesis of a cultural template that consistently exiles female experience to the realm of the “minor” and diagnoses women for transgressing social bounds.” (MIT Press)

Book Club Update

Another book club choice of ours, Victor Serge’s Conquered City, has come and gone. On to the next one!

Our next read will be The True Deceiver, by the Swedish novelist and children’s author Tove Jansson:

“ Snow has been falling on the village all winter long. It covers windows and piles up in front of doors. The sun rises late and sets early, and even during the day there is little to do but trade tales. This year everybody’s talking about Katri Kling and Anna Aemelin. Katri is a yellow-eyed outcast who lives with her simpleminded brother and a dog she refuses to name. She has no use for the white lies that smooth social intercourse, and she can see straight to the core of any problem. Anna, an elderly children’s book illustrator, appears to be Katri’s opposite: a respected member of the village, if an aloof one. Anna lives in a large empty house, venturing out in the spring to paint exquisitely detailed forest scenes. But Anna has something Katri wants, and to get it Katri will take control of Anna’s life and livelihood. By the time spring arrives, the two women are caught in a conflict of ideals that threatens to strip them of their most cherished illusions. ” (NYRB)

On June 26^th, we’ll get together to discuss the book over some drinks. Everyone’s welcome, and anyone partaking receives a 15% discount off the book.

If you would like to join in for our monthly discussions, send an email to argobookshop@gmail.com in order to receive regular updates.

News for upcoming events coming soon!

This week we’ll be hosting the Montreal launch of the first book Whisk by the collaborative poetry group Yoko’s Dogs. Read on for more info, or visit the Facebook event!

Friday April 26th, 7PM to 9PM

Yoko’s Dogs launch Whisk

Written collaboratively in the tradition of Japanese linked poetry or renku, Whisk plays with form and subject matter ranging from the everyday to the intensely lyric, from the urban to the rural. Both humorous and contemplative, Whisk’s verses are linked by means that are neither merely logical nor predictable, with the final emerging poem acting more as journey than story. While drawing on Japanese formal tradition, Yoko’s Dogs’ poetry takes on a distinctly Canadian and contemporary cast that evolved over the course of five years.

Yoko’s Dogs was formed by Jan Conn, Susan Gillis, Mary di Michele and Jane Munro in 2006 around a small tin table at La Maison Verte, a co-op grocery and café in Montreal. Susan Gillis teaches literature and creative writing in Montreal; her most recent books are The Rapids (Brick Books 2012) and Twenty Views of the Lachine Rapids (Gaspereau Press 2012). Mary di Michele, poet and novelist, teaches at Concordia University. Her latest published collection is The Flower of Youth, Pier Paolo Pasolini Poems (ECW Press 2011). Jan Conn is a research scientist in Albany, New York, and her latest book of poems is Edge Effects (Brick Books 2012). Jane Munro lives in Vancouver; her most recent poetry book is Active Pass (Pedlar Press 2010).

Big news! Great news! Read on!

On Thursday May 16th at the Atwater Library, the Argo and the QWF will be presenting the Montreal launch of Phil Hall‘s new book of poems The Small Nouns Crying Faith, published by Toronto’s very own BookThug. And it won’t be like any other: On top of a reading, we’ll have an in-house interview between Phil and Angela Carr! Refreshments! A soirée of literature!

“The first word in this new collection by Phil Hall is “raw” and the last word is “blurtip.” Between these, many nouns cry faith within a hook-less framework that sings in chorus while undermining such standard forms & tropes as “the memoir,” “genealogy” and “the shepherd’s calendar.” With a rural pen, these poems talk frogs, carrots, local noises, partial words, remnants, dirt roads, deep breath & hope…”   – BookThug

And!

For any and all interested parties: If you pre-order a copy of The Small Nouns Crying Faith with us now, you can receive the book at 10% off! Feel free to call, email, message us or just talk to us in person if you’re interested.

You can find the event’s listing on Facebook. Feel free to invite your friends, family and acquaintances!

This week we’ll be hosting two launches, one after the other. Read on for more information!

#1

Thursday, April 18th @ 8PM

Daniel O’Leary launches The Lower Provinces

with Steve Luxton & Walid Bitar

On April 18th, Daniel O’Leary will be holding a long-awaited Montreal launch of his book The Lower Provinces (DC Books 2012) at the Argo Bookshop. ‘Presenting a revived Canadian poetic ethos’, O’Leary’s latest collection of poems is a combination of recovered early Canadian visionary experiences and new translations of early French-Canadian poems and documents to create a series of dramatic settings. In it, O’Leary rejects the notion that Canada lacks a deep and visionary culture, or that the country’s commercial colonization by American financial interests is too far advanced to be resisted. Instead he presents an imaginative, frequently humourous cast of early Canadian voices who reflect as much on our own as on previous times. In both visionary recovery and faux antique pastiche, O’Leary examines the claims of the present and calls for a deeper appreciation of the insight welling up from Canada’s past.

Professor of Canadian Studies at Concordia in Montreal, Daniel O’Leary’s poetry has appeared in Exile, Fiddlehead, the spoken-word anthology Poetry Nation, and in numerous other journals. Aside from an earlier book of poetry, The Sorcerer of Les Trois Frères (Ficciones 1991), he has published work on early Canadian print culture in The History of the Book in Canada and is co-editor with Jonathan Wisenthal of What Shaw Really Wrote About the War. A descendant of early Maritime Canadian families, O’Leary was born on New Brunswick’s Fundy coast and was raised there and in Nova Scotia.

The reading will be hosted by Steve Luxton of DC Books and the poet Walid Bitar.

#2

Friday, April 19th @ 8PM

Argo Featured Reading #16:

Mary Dalton launches Hooking with Sue Sinclair

Mary Dalton and Sue Sinclair will be the readers of our 16th Featured Reading at the shop, an evening of Newfoundland-bred poetry combining both Dalton’s dialectic energy and Sinclair’s cerebral explorations.

Mary Dalton will be launching her latest book Hooking, “a series of centos that, on one level, draw inspiration from a traditional Newfoundland craft. Like a hooked rug made up of strips of fabric cut from old clothes, the cento is stitched together from lines scissored out of other poems. Dalton’s cento variants, however, range across continents and epochs, rummaging among poems contemporary and canonical in celebration of the recombinatory energies of language. As Dalton’s lines hook together syntactically and emotionally, they create a striking music, by turns subtle, startling and dazzling.” (Vehicule 2013)

Mary Dalton is the author of four volumes of poetry, the latest of which include a limited- edition artisanal chapbook Between You and the Weather (2008), and before that, a full- length collection entitled Red Ledger (2006). Her work has been widely anthologized in Canada and abroad, and has received numerous awards, from the E.J. Pratt award and the Newfoundland and Labrador Book Award.

Sue Sinclair is the author of four volumes of poetry. Her debut collection Secrets of Weather and Hope (2001) was a finalist for the Gerald Lampert Award, her second book Mortal Arguments (2003) a finalist for the Atlantic Poetry Prize, and her third collection The Drunken Lovely Bird (2005) won the International Independent Publisher’s Award for Poetry. She is the first appointed Critic-in-Residence by the CWILA, and is currently working on a philosophy doctorate on the subject of beauty.

Tuesday, April 9th @ 7PM:

Brian Bergstrom will read from some of his short story and novella translations of Tomoyuki Hoshino’s We, the Children of Cats (PM Press 2012). A new collection of Hoshino’s early works, the book was recently placed on the longlist of Three Percent’s Best Translated Book Award for the work of both Bergstrom and its co-translator Lucy Fraser. The collection itself is a catalogue of allegorical and surreal tales, observing the transformative qualities of subjects such as technological progress or gender definitions. Stylistically comparable to the magical realism of Marquez or Borges with the foreboding of Kafka, it moves with ease despite strangeness of subject. (see: we think it should win too)

Tomoyuki Hoshino was born in Los Angeles in 1965. He has published 12 books to date, with his debut The Last Gap winning the Bungei Prize in 1997, his second (The Mermaids Sing Wake Up) winning the Mishima Prize in 2000, the Noma Bungei award in 2003 for Fantasista, and most recently the Kenzaburō Oe Award for Literature in 2011 for OreOre. He travels widely, has participated in Writers’ Caravans with authors from India and Taiwan, and he continues to forge ties with his literary counterparts elsewhere in Asia in particular.

Brian Bergstrom is a PhD candidate in East Asian languages and civilizations at the University of Chicago and a Sessional Lecturer at McGill University in Montréal. He is completing a dissertation examining representations of youthful criminals in Japanese literature and popular culture. In addition to his work with Hoshino, he has published articles on the writer Takako Nakamoto and the contemporary Gothic Lolita novelist Novala Takemoto.

The event will be introduced by Adrienne Hurley, the translator of Hoshino’s 2004 novel Lonely Hearts Killer (PM Press 2009). She is an associate professor of East Asian Studies at McGill and a member of the Montreal Anarchist Book Fair Collective.

Here’s a video of Brian reading from the book:

event info:

Tomoyuki Hoshino in Translation: Brian Bergstrom presents We, the Children of Cats

Tuesday, April 9th: Free

Doors @ 7PM, Reading @ 7:30PM

Hello everyone!

You can find a copy of our newsletter for the month of April here: Argo Bookshop Newsletter – April 2013

There’s a lot we encourage you take advantage of this month:

• We’ve got new hours! More time to drop by the shop.

• Even more new arrivals!

• Our National Poetry Month Sale: All in-store poetry is 20% off!

• Book of the Month: Speedboat by Renata Adler

• It’s the final month to peruse our selections from Melville House Press

And 4 events!

(#1)

Tomoyuki Hoshino in Translation: Brian Bergstrom presents We, the Children of Cats


Tuesday, April 9th: Free
Doors @ 7PM, Reading @ 7:30PM


Join us for an evening of Japanese fiction in translation! On April 9th, Brian Bergstrom will read from some of his short story and novella translations from Tomoyuki Hoshino’s We, the Children of Cats. A new collection of Hoshino’s early works, the book was recently placed on the longlist of Three Percent’s Best Translated Book Award for the work of both Bergstrom and its co-translator Lucy Fraser. The collection itself is a catalogue of allegorical and surreal tales, observing the transformative qualities of subjects such as technological progress or gender definitions. Stylistically comparable to the magical realism of Marquez or Borges with the foreboding of Kafka, it moves with ease despite strangeness of subject.

~
(#2)

Argo Featured Reading #16: Mary Dalton launches Hooking with Sue Sinclair 


Friday, April 19th: Free

Doors @ 8PM, Reading @ 8:30PM


Mary Dalton and Sue Sinclair will be the readers of our 16th Featured Reading at the shop, an evening of Newfoundland-bred poetry combining both Dalton’s dialectic energy and Sinclair’s cerebral explorations. Mary Dalton will be launching her latest book ‘Hooking’, “a series of centos that, on one level, draw inspiration from a traditional Newfoundland craft. Like a hooked rug made up of strips of fabric cut from old clothes, the cento is stitched together from lines scissored out of other poems. Dalton’s cento variants, however, range across continents and epochs, rummaging among poems contemporary and canonical in celebration of the recombinatory energies of language. As Dalton’s lines hook together syntactically and emotionally, they create a striking music, by turns subtle, startling and dazzling.” (Vehicule Press)
~
(#3)
Yoko’s Dogs (Jan Conn, Susan Gillis, Mary di Michele & Jane Munro) launch the collective book Whisk
Friday, April 26th: Free

7PM to 9PM
Join Yoko’s Dogs as they launch their first collective book, Whisk. Written collaboratively in the tradition of Japanese linked poetry or renku, Whisk plays with form and subject matter ranging from the everyday to the intensely lyric, from the urban to the rural. Both humorous and contemplative, Whisk’s verses are linked by means that are neither merely logical nor predictable, with the final emerging poem acting more as journey than story. While drawing on Japanese formal tradition, Yoko’s Dogs’ poetry takes on a distinctly Canadian and contemporary cast that evolved over the course of five years.
~
(#4)
Argo Open Mic #16
Tuesday, April 30th, Doors @ 7PM & Reading @ 7:30PM
Montrealers, come read some of your work for 5 to 10 minutes at the Argo Open Mic! Every month, the Argo Bookshop hosts this open venue for people to share their writing, music, articles and comedy. Bring your friends and enjoy the evening!

Lousy Smarch weather…

Until the winter weather subsides, why not continue to curl up in your respective apartments with a good book? In our newsletter, you’ll find suggestions in our lists of the latest title arrivals, our Book of the Month, our Featured Publisher, our new Book Club book, etc… and if you’re looking for the events this month:

#1: Argo Featured Reading #15 with Sarah Burgoyne, Stephanie Bolster & Rachel Lebowitz (launching Cottonopolis, Pedlar Press 2013)… Friday, March 15th, Doors @ 7PM, Reading @ 7:30PM

#2: A Reading with Camille Martin’s Looms and Oana Avasilichioaei’s We, Beasts… Tuesday, March 19th, Doors @ 6:30PM, Reading @ 7PM

#3: Argo Open Mic #15… Wednesday, March 27 ^th, Reading @ 7PM 

You’ll find our newsletter here:

Argo Bookshop Newsletter – March 2013.