Amanda Lamarche's debut collection of poetry is a work of imaginative grace and power. These poems topple the normal hierarchy of everyday concerns, promoting fears unlikely in the 'normal' state of being -- the fear of buttons, of dying to the wrong song, of houses built on corners -- to the same stage and emotional impact as the more common (perhaps more cliched) fears of car crashes and collapsing bridges. The clever combination of explorations emotional and playful carries on. Technical advice for cutting down trees is juxtaposed with the development of ominous personal overtones. The title sequence takes issue with the easy laying down of language by recasting well-worn sayings: giving them back-stories, situating them in real time and real places, and reinvigorating them by providing each its own individual universe from which to draw meaning. Amanda Lamarche's refreshing poems refuse at all the right moments to take themselves too seriously. They have the amazing ability to make readers shift from out-loud laughter to profound insight in a gasp of breath.
Amanda Lamarche's debut collection of poetry is a work of imaginative grace and power. These poems topple the normal hierarchy of everyday concerns, promoting fears unlikely in the 'normal' state of being -- the fear of buttons, of dying to the wrong song, of houses built on corners -- to the same stage and emotional impact as the more common (perhaps more cliched) fears of car crashes and collapsing bridges. The clever combination of explorations emotional and playful carries on. Technical advice for cutting down trees is juxtaposed with the development of ominous personal overtones. The title sequence takes issue with the easy laying down of language by recasting well-worn sayings: giving them back-stories, situating them in real time and real places, and reinvigorating them by providing each its own individual universe from which to draw meaning. Amanda Lamarche's refreshing poems refuse at all the right moments to take themselves too seriously. They have the amazing ability to make readers shift from out-loud laughter to profound insight in a gasp of breath.
Originally from Smooth Rock Falls, Ontario, Amanda Lamarche moved to Gibsons, BC, when she was eleven. She received her BA in English from the University of Victoria before heading to UBC to study for her MFA in Creative Writing. Her work has appeared in Grain, The Malahat Review, Room of One's Own, The Antigonish Review, Prairie Fire and Breathing Fire 2: Canada's New Poets. She is the current poetry editor for PRISM International.
Accomplished and confident ... Lamarche says it with style. This is
an exceptionally strong first book.
--Andrew Vaisius, Prairie Fire
These shape-shifting, quick-witted poems resonate with the energy
of their making; the opening section, "A Book of Fears," is one of
the most compelling groups of poems I've read in a while. Amanda
Lamarche puts both feet into the chilly waters of intuition, and
she does so with levity and grace.
--Stephanie Bolster
You know you are in for a wonderful set of poems when the first
poem causes your heart to skip a beat ... There are no clichés in
The Clichéist.
--Hannah Main-Van der Kamp, BC Bookworld
Amanda Lamarche's book is called The Clichéist, a title that's not
merely wry, but chances to name one of poetry's difficult and
essential projects ... The book's first section, "Book of Fears,"
corresponds in content and structure to many existing lyric-poem
phobia series ... Here, readers are introduced to Lamarche's
capacity for teasing the humour, menace and tenderness from under
the skin of relatively mundane images through diction and syntax
that's both artful and playful ... The final, title section ... in
which clichéd phrases--"Sleep With the Fishes," "No Man is an
Island," etc.--are annotated by stories that seem both to have
generated an instance of the cliché and been generated by it. The
poems are cast in lines fragmented down the page, a kind of
deconstruction of the founding principle of the cliché. Lamarche is
good at this form; the poems read more interestingly for it.
--Karen Solie, Event
... there are lines and images throughout the book that peel away a
part of the ordinary world and reveal it as new ... There is a
familiar and yet utterly strange intimacy in [Lamarche's] words
that I particularly admire."
--Heather Jessup, Malahat Review
Reading Amanda Lamarche's poetry, the slow burn of language gathers
in us. Here's grace, wit, wisdom, courage -- what more could we ask
for in a poet?
--Rhea Tregebov
This writing is driven by an underlying, ineffable vitality, a
legitimacy -- a sense that the words are locked inexorably in place
and the poet knows it.
--Books in Canada
... Lamarche portrays rural subjects whose verbal world is
hard-edged, pocked with profanity, scorn-inflected and zigzaggedly
musical. Here we find stories of smokers and drinkers, hunting town
edge-dwellers, fishing dock sitters, rural inhabitants whose
evening stroll might get them mauled by a bear.
--Margaret Christakos, ARC
|
Ask a Question About this Product More... |
|
