A Broken Bowl

By Patrick Friesen

Set firmly at the end of the millennium, A Broken Bowl takes on the burden of history, with its heaped atrocities, its unimaginable sufferings. This long poem is an angry lament, a summoning of fragments, a meditation in the midst of an exhausted world. By turns lyric, satiric, elegiac and incantatory, A Broken Bowl is filled with passionate elemental writing in the tradition of Howl and Crow.

"Picture-building poetry doesn't get better than this. Patrick Friesen communicates directly to your imagination. These fragments of a broken bowl are, indeed, much greater than the sum of their parts as they spur imaginal encounters not only with Friesen but with the scattered bits of the reader's self - each piece a new gesture to try on." -- Per Brask.

"These are the end days - someone's got a kitchen knife and is 'looking for the government' the river is a 'filthy transfusion.' Patrick Friesen sings this dark song with beauty and a guttering love. We're long past apology, reconstruction: there's only Friesen's voice not nearly enough, sure, but the only thing worthy of trust." -- Tim Lilburn.

NOMINATED for the 1997 Governor General's Award for Poetry.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0919626939
• ISBN13: 9780919626935
• Release Date: October 1997
• Publisher: Brick Books
• Length: 134 Pages
• Weight: 0.52 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.6" x 8.7"