Poetry. Winner of the 1999 Governor General's Award for Poetry and shortlisted for the 1999 Pat Lowther Award and the 1999 Dorothy Livesay Award for Poetry (BC Book Prize). SONGS FOR RELINQUISHING THE EARTH contains many poems of praise and grief for the imperiled earth drawing frequently on Jan Zwicky's experience as a musician and philosopher and on the landscapes of the prairies and rural Ontario. SONGS FOR RELINQUISHING THE EARTH was first published by the author in 1996 as a handmade book, each copy individually sewn for its reader in response to a request. It appeared between plain covers on recycled stock, with a small photo (of lavender fields) pasted into each copy. The only publicity was word of mouth. Part of Jan Zwicky's reason for having the author be the maker and distributor of the book was a desire to connect the acts of publication and publicity with the initial act of composition, to have a book whose public gestures were in keeping with the intimacy of the art. She also believed the potential audience was small enough that she could easily sew enough copies to fill requests as they came in. While succeeding in recalling poetry's public life to its roots, she was wrong about the size of that audience and her ability to keep up with demand as word spread, Hence, this facsimile edition. In publishing it, Brick Books has attempted to remain as faithful as possible to the spirit of those original gestures, while making it possible for more readers to have access to this remarkable book.

In the foreword to Wisdom & Metaphor, Jan Zwicky observes that “those who think metaphorically are enabled to think truly, because the shape of their thinking echoes the shape of the world.” Wisdom & Metaphor explores the ways we come to understand the world through analogical structures, and the relation of this form of knowing to conventional epistemology and ontology. Zwicky uses the nature of the book itself, with its facing pages, to create resonant structures of aphorism and quotation which allow the reader to experience the kind of thinking she describes. The author’s wide-ranging influences, coupled with an understated, largely spatial, style of discourse, make this a remarkably original approach to long-standing questions about meaning and language. It offers a unique and compelling argument for the fundamental importance of metaphor to philosophy.

The poems in this book arise from Robinson's Crossing - the place where the railway ends and European settlers arriving in northern Alberta had to cross the Pembina River and advance by wagon or on foot. How have we crossed into this country, with what violence and what blind love? Robinson's Crossing enacts the pause at the frontier, where we reflect on the realities of colonial experience, but also on the nature of living here- on historical dwelling itself. In long meditative narratives and shorter probing lyrics, Jan Zwicky shows us-as she has in her celebrated Lyric Philosophy and the Governor General's award-winning Songs for Relinquishing the Earth - how music means and meaning is musical. My great- grandmother slept in a boxcar on the night before she made the crossing. The steel ended in Sangudo then, there was no trestle on the Pembina, no siding on the other side. They crossed by ferry, and went on by cart through bush, the same eight miles. Another family legend has it that she stood there in the open doorway of the shack and said, "You told me, Ernest, it had windows and a floor." - from "Robinson's Crossing"

The first woman to achieve wide recognition as a poet in Renaissance Italy, Vittoria Colonna was known for her ardent, but also deeply spiritual, verses. This volume reproduces ten of her sonnets in the original Italian alongside new English versions of compelling simplicity, and complements both with a sequence of moving black and white photographs. Governor General’s Award winner Jan Zwicky gives Colonna’s spiritual insights a contemporary voice, while photographer and noted mathematician Robert Moody paces her words against a visual meditation on the Passion story, as conveyed by Subirachs’ sculptures for the basilica of the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona. The volume’s juxtaposition of poetry and photography illuminates the passion, reverence, and timelessness of both Subirachs’ and Colonna’s work.

Poetry. Philosophy. New and revised edition of an early work by the Governor General's Award-winning poet. On the occasion of the press's 40th anniversary, Brick Books is proud to present the last of our six new editions of classic books from our back catalogue. This edition of WITTGENSTEIN ELEGIES features an expansive Introduction by Sue Sinclair, a new Afterword by the author and a new cover and design by the renowned typographer Robert Bringhurst. First published in 1986, WITTGENSTEIN ELEGIES is a polyphonic poem in five parts. It establishes the parameters of a long conversation between logic and the lyre that has continued over multiple books and in multiple genres. Long out of print, this revised edition is both a must-have for Zwicky's readers and a perfect introduction to her work. Only what is simple is hidden: the leaf in spring, this gesture, the mind of God. "The Death of George Trakl" Praise for WITTGENSTEIN ELEGIES: "Zwicky shows us that there is a way of speaking that leaves room for what cannot be spoken." Sue Sinclair, from the Introduction."

Poet and philosopher Jan Zwicky bears passionate witness to the leading edge of environmental cataclysm.

In this ground-breaking study on the nature of philosophy, Jan Zwicky demonstrates how much of potential philosophical significance is lost if our notion of meaningful language is constrained by narrow concepts of analytic rigour. Her aim is not to dismiss the role of analysis in philosophy; rather she strives to augment its resources and thereby give to philosophy a voice with greater range and integrity. Two parallel texts, on facing pages, run through the book. The primary one is Zwicky’s, which begins with a critique of existing criteria for defining a work as philosophy, and then develops the notion of lyric in its relation to two other key terms: technology and domesticity. She finishes with an exploration of meaning, form, and content in lyric contexts. The parallel text consists of quotations from other authors. It serves as commentary on, illustration of, and reaction to, the main text; as a way of acknowledging intellectual debts; and as a way of providing an historical context for some of the main text’s claims. Highly original in its thought and presentation, Zwicky’s discussion makes an exciting contribution to contemporary philosophy, forging new connections and expanding old boundaries.

“A novelistic mosaic that simultaneously reads like a thriller and like a strange, dreamlike excursion into the subconscious.” —The New York Times Years ago, when House of Leaves was first being passed around, it was nothing more than a badly bundled heap of paper, parts of which would occasionally surface on the Internet. No one could have anticipated the small but devoted following this terrifying story would soon command. Starting with an odd assortment of marginalized youth -- musicians, tattoo artists, programmers, strippers, environmentalists, and adrenaline junkies -- the book eventually made its way into the hands of older generations, who not only found themselves in those strangely arranged pages but also discovered a way back into the lives of their estranged children. Now this astonishing novel is made available in book form, complete with the original colored words, vertical footnotes, and second and third appendices. The story remains unchanged, focusing on a young family that moves into a small home on Ash Tree Lane where they discover something is terribly wrong: their house is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. Of course, neither Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Will Navidson nor his companion Karen Green was prepared to face the consequences of that impossibility, until the day their two little children wandered off and their voices eerily began to return another story -- of creature darkness, of an ever-growing abyss behind a closet door, and of that unholy growl which soon enough would tear through their walls and consume all their dreams.