Jeopardy
Publisher: Acorn Press$19.95Richard Lemm’s new poetry collection, Jeopardy, opens with visits to Tasmania and Egypt. He takes readers to the infamous penal colony on the Tasman Peninsula, then imagines an alternate history in which convicts were sent to Prince Edward Island. Lemm explores his pre- and post-Revolution experiences teaching Egyptian students and encountering a great civilization wrestling with cross-currents of modernity and tradition. His poetic gaze then turns to the struggle of a couple living the ordeal of severe anorexia and the quest for healing.
In “The Sacred and the Profane” poems, he conjures myths and journeys —ancient and modern—to illuminate how we choose to live in the present: a Jewish surgeon’s pilgrimage to Assisi; Adam and Eve’s reflections on their fateful Edenic choice; the poet’s grandfather trading farm clothes for an army uniform and war in the Philippines; a resurrected L. M. Montgomery in a gift shop, surrounded by Anne of Green Gables merchandise. In the final section, Lemm evokes, with wit and urgency, our ecological reality and environmental crises: “The future is forever / now, is headlines scrolling / at glacial melt and animated pixel / speed into amnesia. While the Darwins / of tomorrow and their painstaking facts / watch from the crow’s nests, swaying above / our faith in charts, invincible hulls.”
Other poets have written of Lemm’s “passionate engagement with human nature, including his own,” of how he “masterfully blends his narrative poetic style with lyrical sweeps across time and space,” and of his “wit, his spilling love of life and his poetic magnetism.”
Snow Softly Falling Holiday Stories from Prince Edward Island
Editor: Richard LemmPublisher: Acorn Press$19.95A call was sent out asking writers to submit unpublished short stories for a fiction anthology featuring writers with a significant P.E.I. connection. Ther qualification was that it the story be about the holidays. PEI is strong on tradition, which includes out-migration and immigration. Thus, its culture and demographics are changing, and these PEI writers both are Island-born and hail from away.
The result is a collection of stories, essays and poems that will resonate with readers from all backgrounds.
Riptides New Island Fiction
Publisher: Acorn Press$21.95A call was sent out asking writers to submit unpublished short stories for a fiction anthology featuring newer writers with a significant P.E.I. connection. There were no boundaries for setting or genre, only a limit of 5,000 words. PEI is strong on tradition, which includes out-migration and immigration. Thus, its culture and demographics are changing, and these PEI writers both are Island-born and hail from away – Australia and Calgary, Newfoundland and Ukraine. The result is twenty-three stories, which take the reader from a ritual gathering of PEI widows to Chernobyl in the nuclear disaster’s aftermath, from a menacing marital game of hide-and-seek through the Maritime landscape to gender clashes on an outback sheep ranch, from a religious commune in Alberta to the Enlightenment Tour bus into Quebec. Whether the characters are struggling for dear life in breaking surf, gasping for emotional air at a ladies’ candle party or fearing the Tall Tailor’s scissors, the authors demonstrate a rich variety of fictional talent and imagination emerging from what Island poet Milton Acorn called the “red tongue…In the ranged jaws of the Gulf,” and revising our perception of “the land of Anne.”
Shape of Things to Come
Editor: Richard LemmPublisher: Acorn Press$19.95In this new collection, Richard Lemm traces his own journey from the west coast of North America to the east coast of Canada with his first foray into the world of short fiction. His hard-living characters follow their own paths through relationships with parents and siblings, friends and lovers, discovering and sometimes crossing their limits as they try to find their own way in the world. A thirty-something man takes a chance on finding love after he encounters an exotic opera singer on an airplane. Two brothers face their own ghosts as they come to terms with the death of their father. A young man tries to live with his friends’ idea of justice after one of them crosses the line. The stories are decidedly masculine – sometimes apologetically so – but always honest. They resonate long after the pages are closed, offering a fresh voice from one of Atlantic Canada’s finest poets.
