The Bindery

This third collection from award winning poet Shane Rhodes takes off in full flight from where his other books left off. Tracing concurrent themes of travel, love, personal and collective history, all in a rich multifaceted style unique to Rhodes, The Bindery is writing that combines moving lyrical poetry with experimental verve. One of the main sections of the book is a series of prose poems based on travels through Latin America where we are taken from the Conquistadores to the Mexican revolution, and all the way to the present and shop-keepers in Mexico City. Other poems in the book look at travel to India, Argentina, and across Canada through language, history, and collected stories. The title poem of the book, a remarkable long poem, is a rich collage of lyrical and prose poems with haiku, philosophical meditations, aphorisms, and photographs.

The Bindery is a collection of hurried scribbles in Mexican bus terminals, meditations on street corners in Buenos Aires, letters from friends in the Himalaya, and odes from the Canadian hinterland. The book's emphasis is on how to live and travel in a life bound-up with language and history, how to read the present through the past, how to be awake in the world and, as one poem states, how "to be stained by what we see. "

Shane Rhodes is the author of The Wireless Room (1-896300-15-4), which won the Alberta Book Award for poetry, and Holding Pattern (1-896300-60-X), which won the Archibald Lampman Award. He has published chapbooks, poems, reviews, articles, and essays in magazines and newspapers across Canada and has worked as an editor with filling Station, The Fiddlehead, and Qwerty. Rhodes' poetry has recently appeared in a number of Canadian poetry anthologies including New Canadian Poetry and Breathing Fire II. Rhodes lives in Ottawa, ON.