Purchase Info
- Toronto’s Another Story Bookshop
- Toronto’s Glad Day Lit
- Glasgow’s Category Is Books
- Edinburgh’s Lighthouse Bookshop
- Order directly from San (5 copies left!)
paypal.me/SanAlland
UK = £10.90 (£9 + £1.90 postage)
Europe = £14.35 (£9 + £5.35 postage)
Canada & Worldwide = £16.35 (£9 + £7.35 postage)
Highlights
- San’s second collection of poetry; 80 pages
- poetry, creative ‘translation’
- includes audio, film and photography via URL poems
- published by Book*hug, Toronto, 2007
Description
Whether you have the book or not, you can engage with the multimedia ‘translations’ to audio, video and photographs in the index of Blissful Times Booklinks.
“Do we, any of us, speak the same language? Blissful Times is a collection of poetry that tries to find out. Beginning with manipulated text from Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days, Sandra Alland then ‘translates’ one poem 63 times, morphing it into different poetic forms and emotional states, even different media. Using formal constraints, specialty dictionaries, internet search and translation engines, voice-activated software, the weather, global news and personal experiences, Alland invents pieces ranging from lyric poetry to sound poetry, from theatre to rant, from photography to Boggle. Edgy, passionate, amusing and intelligent, Blissful Times is a poetic cocktail for our troubled times.”
Watch/listen to a captioned video of San reading from Blissful Times on YouTube.
Reviews
Open Letter: A Canadian Journal of Writing and Theory, John Stout, Victoria
“A rather amazing tour de force showcasing poetry’s aptitude for invention and re-invention.”
make/shift Magazine, Julia Bloch, San Francisco
“…reminds me of Bernadette Mayer’s belief that poetic experiment shows us exactly how much language can affect empirical meaning… poems like these encourage the reader to look beneath the surface of language, only to find more words there.”
toronto.untilmonday.com, Stacey Mae Fowles, Toronto
“For those of us who enjoy witnessing a gifted writing talent explore the possibilities of text with an almost scientific tenacity, the book never disappoints. For those of use who simply enjoy a well-rendered read, the same satisfaction applies.”