Sentenced to Light

Description

An astonishing series of unique collaborative image-text projects, Sentenced to Light privileges its poetic and formal textual space outside most of the images that are its original twins and offers the reader a glimpse of the dialectic of larger conversations, the unpredictable, improvisatory bavardage that whispers between words and pictures in a space we call culture. "Anecdotal Waters" is an invited response to a mixed-media installation by Mireille Perron and Paul Woodrow. "Articulations" was printed on a series of fifty paintings by Calgary artist Bev Tosh and incorporated in both an installation and a performance of the work. "All Americans" was serialized for an installation on the Minnesota Massacre of 1862. A biotext of landscape and memory, "Twain" consists of textual improvisations provoked by and situated alongside six poems that artist Marian Penner Bancroft applied directly to the walls among the photographs in her exhibition "By Land and Sea (Prospect and Refuge)." The alphabet of "jingo cards" was written for a collaborative performance piece with Vancouver multi-media artist Haruko Okano called "High Bridi Tea" that gestated years later into her jargon art project "Homing Pidgin." "Pop Goes the Hood," was written for a video-text performance commissioned from video artist Henry Tsang and poet Fred Wah. "Me Too" pays ghostly homage to the visual and textual work of Roy Kiyooka. The two "transcreations" are part of photographer Ernie Kroeger's "Wild Writing" project that uses his photographically treated rubbings of the glyphs left by the Mountain Pine Beetle. The series of ppretenses (prose-poem sentences) was written for "Pays Maya," a show of photographer Richard Baillergeon's Yucatan images. In the title section, the prose-poem sentences stretch to comprehend the vanishing edges of lens, eye and syntax within Mexican photographer Eric Jervaise's black-and-white photos, made with his hand-built panoramic view camera.

Fred Wah was one of the founding editors of the poetry newsletter TISH. Of his 17 books of poetry, is a door received the BC Book Prize, Waiting for Saskatchewan received the Governor-General's Award and So Far was awarded the Stephanson Award for Poetry. Diamond Grill, a biofiction about hybridity and growing up in a small-town Chinese-Canadian cafe won the Howard O'Hagan Award for Short Fiction, and his collection of critical writing, Faking It: Poetics and Hybridity, received the Gabrielle Roy Prize.

"The cover as a composition is inspired like the whole book--there is a minimalism in it--it is so structured yet never over-wrought--the shadow of the figure and camera 'producing' the composition (literally) of the book fully--here then--I think--I place it next to Nichol's Martyrology. I think too it's as great, as astonishing as bissett's major self-anthologized books. The 'visual' intelligence that informs this book is extraordinary! I admire it's clarity--'Sentenced' so far is my favorite poem in the book but that says nothing--there are too many! His book is an exhibition, a performance, a documentary and the montage, its potency, is seamless. This book is an extraordinary gift." -- Carl Peters "For those new to Wah's work, Sentenced to Light provides an accessible and beautifully produced introduction to a major poet. For longtime readers, it offers a reminder that Wah, as he enters the fifth decade of his career, is continually returning to origins--to memory, vision, and the body--in renewing his poetry. 'The cradle,' Wah declares 'is where I want to be.' " -- Boog City "One has the sense of Wah's effort to catch inspiration in its everydayness and at its most raw and vital." -- Canadian Literature