Sunday, June 20, 2010

bpNichol winner

YOU HAVE
HAIR LIKE FLAGS,
FLAGS THAT POINT
IN MANY DIRECTIONS
AT ONCE BUT CANNOT
PINPOINT LAND
WHEN LOST
AT SEA

Written by Alisha Piercy (Your Lips to Mine Press, 2010), has just won the bpNichol Poetry Chapbook Award.

Thursday, June 3, 2010

bpNichol shortlist 2010

Shortlisted for the 2010 bpNichol chapbook award

YOU HAVE
HAIR LIKE FLAGS, FLAGS
THAT POINT IN MANY DIRECTIONS
AT ONCE BUT CANNOT
PINPOINT LAND
WHEN LOST
AT SEA

Alisha Piercy (Your Lips to Mine Press, Montreal and Berlin, 2010)

and

Mark Callanan, Sea Legend, Frog Hollow Press
Larissa Lai, Eggs in the Basement, Nomados
Aaron Tucker, Apartments, The Emergency Response Unit

*Award ceremony 23 June, 2010, at 20 Gothic Ave. Toronto, Gala Room.

HAIR LIKE FLAGS...


is a story that explores the perceptual world that leads up to, and surrounds, the event of being lost, adrift at sea for 30 days.

You have hair like flags.

It is an incantation for an outlaw, a clandestin with no papers for the new country who is full of wanderlust and dreams. The naufragĂ©: a French word like sinking, shipwreck. But not yet; this manadrift is buoyed, transcends himself daily with optimism and passion. Faith. He is lionhearted. Drifthearted. A raftstrotteur. A flotsamoor who dreams of another life, who paces his city streets by night with a flashlight in search of the sea. What is the name for this suicidaire puer aeternus on a sideways rove, a to and fro, between this life and the what-life, like a shark, when what’s likely is that he’ll be eaten by one.

YOU HAVE HAIR LIKE FLAGS,.... is a story about spirit, identity, home, movement, adventure, and force. Told in stark prose, it recounts the tale of “You” who has the daring to leave, to fall, to disappear. To push the raft off from the shore and go to sea.

4 x 6”
limited edition of 50 signed and numbered copies
38 pages, handsewn, covers screenprinted in a varied edition.
Winter, 2010
Your Lips to Mine Press
$25

Your Lips to Mine Press, created in 2010 by Alisha Piercy and Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay, publishes swoonfaring print projects and fine bookworks in small editions.

Praise for Piercy’s writing:
Alisha Piercy’s stunning debut novellas, Icebreaker and Auricle, pivot between the tumult of lust, the freakishness of the extrasensory, and the menace of our interior worlds. Her prose has the fierce exactitude of dying words, and yet it lulls, beguiles, and winks with its sultriness. It can be sly. It can be horrifying. It can be funny. To hypnotic effect, Piercy achieves that rare feat of capturing the collective strangeness of the human experience. I will carry this book in my breast pocket. I will read it again and again. Brilliant.
-Claudia Dey, author of STUNT, Coach House Press