New ebooks From Canadian Indies

9781770891357_cover Enlarge Cover
0 of 5
0 ratings
rated!
rated!
list price: $18.95
edition:Paperback
also available: eBook
category: Poetry
published: Mar 2006
ISBN:9780887847462
publisher: House of Anansi Press Inc

The Good Bacteria

by Sharon Thesen

tagged: canadian
Description

In crisp, intimate, and uncluttered language, award-winning and critically acclaimed poet Sharon Thesen gives us a layered meditation on energy and endings: the irrepressible energy of life; and the end of the natural world, of home, of love, youth, and safety.Thesen's talent is for catching beauty at the periphery of things -- a glimpse of neighbour's yellow dress, a tube of polysporin, a blue-and-white tin awning the mind momentarily mistakes for a lake.

Thesen's voice -- musical, personable, alive to joy and despair in equal measure -- reminds us of the kind of spiritual yearning that can surprise any of us, even in our most mundane moments. With nods to predecessors who searched for the Ideal in the local -- Frank O'Hara, Robert Creeley, S. T. Coleridge, and John Berryman -- The Good Bacteria is a beautiful addition to Sharon Thesen's considerable achievements.

About the Author

Sharon Thesen

Poet, editor and teacher Sharon Thesen (born Tisdale, SK) has spent almost all her life in British Columbia. After studies at Simon Fraser University, she began teaching in 1975 at the then-Capilano College in North Vancouver, where for many years she edited The Capilano Review. Artemis Hates Romance, her first book of poetry in 1980, was followed by thirteen more, three of them finalists for the Governor General's Award: Confabulations, 1984; The Beginning of the Long Dash, 1987; and The Good Bacteria, 2006. She edited The Vision Tree, a selected poems by Phyllis Webb (Governor General’s Award, 1982), two editions of the The New Long Poem Anthology (1991 and 2001), and, with Ralph Maud, two volumes of correspondence between American poet Charles Olson and book-designer and Joyce scholar Frances Boldereff (1999 and 2012). At UBC Okanagan, where she taught from 2003 to 2012, Thesen and poet Nancy Holmes co-edited Lake: A Journal of Arts and Environment. The Receiver (2017) is her most recent collection, and in 2021, The Wig-Maker was published, a book-length poem created in concert with Janet Gallant from Gallant’s memoirs. Since 2020, the annual “Sharon Thesen Lecture” at UBC Okanagan honours Thesen’s contribution to poetry and poetics. Her archives are held at the McGill University Library in Montreal and at Simon Fraser University’s Special Collections in Burnaby, BC.
Contributor Notes

Sharon Thesen is the author The Good Bacteria, which was a finalist for the Governor General’ s Literary Award for Poetry, the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, and the ReLit Award, and seven previous collections of poetry. She received the Pat Lowther Memorial Award for her collection A Pair of Scissors and she has been for a finalist for the British Columbia Book Prize. She was born in Tisdale, Saskatchewan, and now lives in British Columbia, where she is a professor at University of British Columbia.

Awards
  • Short-listed, Pat Lowther Memorial Award
  • Short-listed, Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize
  • Short-listed, Governor General's Literary Awards: Poetry
  • Short-listed, ReLit Awards - Poetry
Editorial Review

...Thesen's writing is discursive and deceptively accessible.

— Malahat Review

Out of print

This edition is not currently available in bookstores. Check your local library or search for used copies at Abebooks.

X
Contacting facebook
Please wait...