BOOKS
Titles in order of most recent through to earliest publication date; please scroll down.
November's Radio
November's Radio is a satiric tour de force from one of Canada's funniest, wisest and very best under-the-radar writers. Here is a winking yet deadly-serious portrait of how Big Pharma controls our moods, and also our impulse to art. Here is a brash and spunky China we've not seen before, but somehow know to be true. And here is a book that will outsmart every book on the shelf.
— Bill Gaston, author of The World |
Small Data
Featuring short, tight lyrics of lexical exuberance, Small Data showcases the best work of Steve Noyes' career to date. This small collection builds on Noyes' familiar humour and emotion, adding to the data already compiled about Noyes: a deft showman.
Printed on 80 lb. archival and acid-free Mohawk Via 'vellum', this book has been released as a numbered limited edition, Smyth-sewn chapbook.
|
Rainbow Stage-ManchuriaAmbitious, compassionate and wise, with unforgettable characters who leap off the page, fully-fleshed and deeply flawed, Steve Noyes’ new collection is that rare thing in Canadian poetry: a page turner.
— Steve McOrmond, author of The Good News about Armageddon Noyes is one of our best poets. Some of his poems have the weight of a novel, and others have a pure lyric or attentive deep thrust into a person or particular.
— A.F. Moritz, author of The Sentinel |
It is Just that Your House is So Far Away
A bittersweet song to Beijing, to the Chinese language, and to the Chinese, It Is Just That Your House Is So Far Away is foremost a lovers' tune, tender and sad. Steve Noyes knows China and knows the human heart, and entwines them beautifully. A lovely, truthful novel, sung without a false note.
— Charles Foran, author of Planet Lolita and Mordecai: The Life and Times. Divorced, adrift, and fast approaching forty, Jeff Mott has come to China, fascinated by the culture and the language. He secures a teaching post in a small town north of Beijing, where he falls in love with a young woman; her family life and emotions seem increasingly complex and disturbing ...
|
Morbidity and Ornament
Noyes compels the reader's ear. His attention to diction, metre, the particular argot of place, lifts the material from its potential opacity, exclusivity, rendering even the alien script of Mandarin, athletic patter and the distance of Chaucer's text a song that resonates, at home in its diaspora of rhythms.
— Catherine Owen, author of The Day of the Dead: Sliver Fictions What a pleasure to read such a rich and accomplished collection. ...Quite simply, Morbidity and Ornament is poetry at its very best.
— Patricia Young, author of An Auto-Erotic History of Swings |
Ghost Country
Ghost Country is not so much a book of poetry as the rangefinder of an exquisite camera, in which two worlds merge to form a single, rich vision. To read this book is to walk into this vision, to breath its air, to speak its language. It's a journey worth taking, one that will linger long after the last page is turned.
— Terence Young, author of The End of the Ice Age Set in contemporary China, these poems spring from the intense anguished observations of the lover of a culture who is also, inescapably, the outsider.
|
Hurriya
A long poem takes a drive through western Canada and becomes a complex dream about personal and larger histories; a series of poems set in Turkey turns on itself, becoming a subversive travelogue; and finally the voice of Omar Khayyam tours the ancient and modern worlds, providing a meditative dialogue between west and east, man and woman.
Hurriya is a luminous and unusual book. — Stan Dragland, author of Strangers & Others: Newfoundland Essays |
Cities of India
Through techniques of memory and reflection, realism and fantasy, the eleven stories in this collection depict the modern struggle for one's centre. At the center of the collection is the novella Pictures of Istanbul, a cinematic imagining of the urban desert of human relationships.
Written with a clarity of perception, these stories strike the core of common experience. Victoria, Winnipeg, Istanbul, or Germany of another century, the setting is always the same: the cities of India are within. |
Backing into Heaven
He flows, he dances, he's alive, and accomplishes all three at once. And humor? Sure. But not slight snickers from academe: Catullus and Edward Lear laughter. None of us know what time is: but it makes hair grey and hurricanes enjoyment into memory which is often the same thing. We remember, all of us, the moment of happening; in these poems it's happening now.
In a sober and carefully understated voice I say: this is a damn good poet. — Al Purdy |