{"title":"Talonbooks","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"9780889226050","title":"gifts","description":"\u003cp\u003eThe eponymous first part of mclennan’s new book consists of fifty “gifts” each centred around words, phrases, or “glyphs” of language that initiate and replicate their own fractal transformations: some remain simply found fragments about which other words and phrases unfold, some lose themselves into pieces that we forget were once found, some mirror themselves in other forms, others become simply something other in language as it moves both with and away from them, each creating a syntax of meaning that is specific to its own occasion. All are addressed to the poet’s intimates—two dozen are, significantly, valentines—the rest admonitions, remembrances, messages and homages made public by the readers’ acts of witness.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn part two, “incomplete,” we are invited to watch the poet robbed of his intent as unexpected words interrupt his texts, turning declaratives into interrogatives, questions into requests: “would you leave (accidental) behind”—each poem an apparent loop of closure, but one that signifies its “failure” or incompletion by ending, or starting over again, with its first [title] word. In part three, “weightless,” the poet frees the signifier from the weight of the signified. He brackets and strikes through what we think of as “known” in the “real world” that is always outside language, because it is [named].\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhat unifies or makes these four parts into a book are the personae the poet assigns to the lover: in the first as an intimate; in the second as an interruption of the determinative self—the other that brings us back to the self; in the third as an undefinable and thereby unattainable weightlessness; and finally as the gravitational pull of the landscape itself—all of them “unfinished” at the speaker’s age, as the title of part four implies: “[sex at thirty-eight] unfinished shield notes: letters to g.”\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56295538557301,"sku":"9780889226050","price":13.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780889226050_2f11c493-85b9-47d2-a353-b1dcf1836811.jpg?v=1786015825"},{"product_id":"desert-of-the-heart","title":"Desert of the Heart","description":"\u003cp\u003eWhen Jane Rule’s first novel, \u003cem\u003eDesert of the Heart\u003c\/em\u003e, was published in 1964, it was an auspicious beginning for a writer who would build a reputation on her unflinching views about sexuality, relationships and the painful constrictions of societal convention. Even more astonishing is the way in which the novel has retained its cool quiet beauty and power of expression decades later.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eEvelyn Hall is a literature professor who travels to Reno, Nevada in the summer of 1958 in order to obtain a divorce and thus put an end to her disastrous sixteen-year marriage. She is divorcing her husband on the advice of his psychiatrist because, this being the ’50s, he believes that Evelyn’s success is causing her husband’s depression. During her six-week stay at a boarding house (a residency requirement) Evelyn meets Ann Childs.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAt once, the narrative enters an aesthetic space that calls to mind the mythical preoccupations of Thomas Mann, the philosophical speculations of Frederich Nietzsche, the artistic theories of Camille Paglia, and the wry ironic humour of Iris Murdoch. They rapidly become aware of an increasing tension, arising in part from the generational gap between Evelyn and this young woman who bears a striking physical resemblance to her.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAs for Ann, she is most alluring in her representation of freedom to Evelyn, from her innate artistic prowess to her unconventional liaisons amid the smoky nocturnal backdrop of casino life. And once these women have found the promise of a significant relationship, Rule’s rather open-ended question is whether or not it can survive the toxic atmosphere, not simply of an unruly gambling town, but of the past sorrows and hardships each of the characters is attempting to put behind them.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe title derives from W.H. Auden’s elegy for Yeats—“In the desert of the heart \/ Let the healing fountain start.”\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57483353882997,"sku":"9780889223011","price":14.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780889223011.jpg?v=1786178494"}],"url":"https:\/\/backstory.london\/collections\/publisher-talonbooks.oembed","provider":"Backstory","version":"1.0","type":"link"}