The music of thinking. The thinking of music. FRED WAH Music at the Heart of Thinking (Talonbooks) is a lifelong poem project that responds to readings in contemporary writing, art, and ideas from the past forty years. The text works through language as the true practice of thought, and improvisation as the tool that listens to thinking and notates it. From jazz, it takes the unpredictable ad lib driving itself from itself. From a drunken Shaolin monk, the poem as imbalanced tai chi. From Keats’s negative capability, the half-closed eye, the estrangement of language. Continuing the work of two nowout- of-print publications, Music at the Heart of Thinking (1987) and Alley, Alley Home Free (1990), this expanded and ongoing Music at the Heart of Thinking relocates critical language and thinking to the poetic bavardage at the heart of such endeavours. Within this poetry of estrangement lie possible coherences for some sense of writing as a notation for thinking as feeling. BUY THE BOOK
JAMES LINDSAY Double Self-Portrait (Wolsak & Wynn) explores doubling and reproduction in art, memory, culture, nostalgia and fatherhood. Divided by four longer, more autobiographical poems, Double Self-Portrait is a deeply layered collection, one that at times speaks directly to the reader and at other times is meta-textual. Bees, cicadas, music and photography swirl through these poems, bounded as they are by the resistance to and embracing of responsibility. This is a collection where the poems work individually and together, subtly building toward a single theme that slowly coalesces during the reading to create a collection that resonates in your mind long after the book is closed. – ROSS McKIE BUY THE BOOK
KFB SALON/line Presents
knife | fork | book 