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Di Brandt's Walking to Mojacar shortlisted for two awards


March 21, 2011


Di Brandt's new poetry collection, Walking to Mojacar, with French and Spanish translations by Charles Leblanc and Ari Belathar (Turnstone 2010) has been shortlisted for both the McNally Robinson Manitoba Best Book of the Year Award and the Mary Scorer Award for Best Book by a Manitoba Publisher. The awards will be announced at a ceremony in Winnipeg on April 17.

Walking to Mojacar is available at good bookstores everywhere, or can be ordered directly
from Turnstone Press at www.turnstonepress.com, (204) 947-1555.

Di Brandt is the author of six poetry collections, including questions i asked my mother (1987), Agnes in the sky (1990), Jerusalem, beloved (1990), and Now You Care (2003). Her critical anthology, Wider Boundaries of Daring: The Modernist Impulse in Canadian Women's Poetry (with Barbara Godard) was recently shortlisted for the Canada Prize in the Humanities.

Di Brandt holds a Canada Research Chair in Literature and Creative Writing at Brandon University, where she directs the first Poetry Video Lab in a Canadian university.

Reviewers' comments about Walking to Mojacar:

Di Brandt has surpassed herself in this extraordinary book, which hurls itself upon our desperate environmental, emotional, spiritual condition with fury and eloquence and headlong grace. The sequence “Hymns for Detroit,” which sets German hymns the poet heard in her Mennonite farming childhood against “trans(e)lations” for that most damaged city, could make the angels weep. Everywhere,Walking to Mojacar makes us know how far we have gone toward catastrophe, and yet how much passion, imagination, intelligence, and—therefore, perhaps—hope remain. In a prose poem, Brandt asks, “Who knows what this new age will remember of us as it tells its tales and stories to its children?” May these poems be among them.
Ann Fisher-Wirth, author of Carta Marina, and coeditor of the forthcoming Ecopoetry: A Contemporary American Anthology

In Di Brandt's experiments across languages, and in the work of the translators who contribute to these pages, translation is the source of an astonishing poetics, where 'joining procedures' are a principle of invention. This is a book of connections, where cities, landscapes, languages and poetic forms intermingle. Brandt's lyric voice expands the world, revealing the gaps between languages and memories to be a space where rich dramas unfold.
Sherry Simon, author of Translating Montreal and Gender in Translation

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