Types of Canadian Women and of Women Who Are or Have Been Connected with Canada, Volume II
Gaspereau Press | 2006 | $19.95 CAN | $17.95 US | 1-55447-022-6 | Poetry | Trade paper | 128 pages
“Press is delightfully irreverent, her writing laced with irony and wit. ... Press handles tone beautifully, slipping dark and disturbing pieces between the lighter bits; their effect is all the more unsettling for the contrast. It’s an ancient format, instruction through delight, but it remains resilient.” — Quill & Quire
“wondrous and unclassifiable” — John K. Samson, Winnipeg Free Press
“Press hints at the complexities of inner lives with great economy, writing adeptly of struggle, sadness and sometimes happiness, with a fine ear and a conviction that these women haunt us.” — This Magazine
“Types of Canadian Women is [an] individual project, having less to do with history as such (revisioned or otherwise), and more to do with a kind of impenetrable and straight-faced weirdness, the distance and fascination of cryptic old images, the strangeness of imagining others.” — Maggie Helwig, rabble.ca
Poems from the book
Somehow the only surviving online poem from Types of Canadian Women is this reading of "Married the Professor" on John Degen's blog back in 2007.
Awards
The book was shortlisted for both the ReLit Award for Poetry and the Pat Lowther Memorial Award.
Design
Types of Canadian Women (etc.), Volume II, is cheekily modelled on an early twentieth-century biographical dictionary of the same name (you can read an old blog post of mine about it and this article in a Toronto Metropolitan University library exhibit). The poems were each written with an archival photograph in mind, and the photographs accompany most of the poems in the book. Gaspereau Press also produced a limited-edition hardcover of the book.
Someone on Goodreads panned my book because they mixed it up with the original biographical dictionary. Why they felt the need to review an obscure biographical dictionary from more than a century ago, I don't know. The things you never realized would happen when you gave your book a clever title in 2006.
