CuRRents

"It was part of our education, learning to lean on the wind, trusting the wind, learning to be the hypotenuse." "Trigonometry, our teacher explained, is the study of angles. Late for school is a failure to Connect two points with a straight line." "The blizzard sealed our eyes, we said. We had to walk backwards in order to see---our tracks in the snow, the shape of the wind." "The past, we argued, must be a curved line. Walking backwards in the driven snow, we had arrived, by our calculations, early to class." "With a prodigious body of innovative writing behind him, Robert Kroetsch turns to a Starker lyrical mode in Too Bad: Sketches Toward a Self-Portrait, Oscillating between the many moods of a human heart that has lived through so much---from whimsy and scorn through desire, longing, lust, love, and serenity---these sketches mark a candid walk through the tortuous corridors of the poet's remembering, and exemplify the memorable dictum of an old teacher. "Every enduring poem was written today."" ""This book is not an autobiography, It is a gesture toward a self-portrait, which I take to be quite a different kettle of fish."--Robert Kroetsch"--Jacket.

"Poet Rita Kleinhart disappeared from the Museum of Modern Art in Frankfurt on June 26, 1992 at age fifty-five. She has not been seen alive since. All that remains of Rita are mounds of poems: finished, unfinished, and unfinishable." "But where has Rita gone? As her "intimate friend" Raymond sorts through the papers in her abandoned ranch house, the "fragments after a fragment" whirl and dissolve into a mystery, a romance, a primer, a fiction."--BOOK JACKET.

"Shortly after its birth in 1905, the province of Alberta was already neck-deep in trouble." "The settlement of the Peace River country reached dangerously too far. The southeastern dry belt disintegrated in drought. Irrigation projects teetered in crisis. Coal miners agonized over their lives and their livings. And clergymen serving hundreds of new communities and tenuous outposts were stretched to the breaking point.". "Against this background of confrontation, constraint and adversity, Albertans searched for human fulfillment in their personal lives." "David C. Jones follows the sagas of a heretic, an artist, two paladins of the people, a coal boss and his enemies, a spy, a priest, a cat, and a sage. Through his eyes we see what the human spirit does with misfortune: the spirit feeds on trouble until it grows or sickens."--BOOK JACKET.