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    Ashland
    Ashland
    Ashland
    Ebook84 pages30 minutes

    Ashland

    By Gil Adamson

    ()

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    About this ebook

    We look away from his open mouth,
    look instead at the corn, the crows
    floating above the river in their private worries.
    Tonight, when we turn in,
    the candle will sputter and blow.
    Pinched out easily, all flame
    gives way to this wide black wing.
    – excerpt from “Black Wing”

    The poems in Ashland, originally published by ECW in 2003, lay the groundwork for Adamson’s award-winning and internationally bestselling novel, The Outlander.

    Neogothicism, the surrealist snapshot, feminist Western and postmodern parable are just some of the elements that feed Gil Adamson’s second collection of poems. Adamson creates a world fully awash in violence and history, the absurdities of the frontier, the gorgeous terrors of death. Everything is simple, and yet nothing is as it seems.

    Moving easily from prose poem to lyric, verbal portrait to improbable biography, Ashland leads us on a macabre tour of our nightmares, perverse secrets, and death-focused mythologies: “In the end we see ourselves. We last longer. The night opens its mouth, and we step in.”
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherECW Press
    Release dateApr 1, 2011
    ISBN9781554909858
    Ashland
    Author

    Gil Adamson

    GIL ADAMSON is the critically acclaimed author of Ridgerunner, which won the Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, was a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and was named a best book of the year by the Globe and Mail and the CBC. Her first novel, The Outlander, won the Dashiell Hammett Prize for Literary Excellence in Crime Writing, the Amazon.ca First Novel Award, the ReLit Award, and the Drummer General’s Award. It was a finalist for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, CBC Canada Reads, and the Prix Femina in France; longlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award; and chosen as a Globe and Mail and Washington Post Top 100 Book. She is also the author of a collection of linked stories, Help Me, Jacques Cousteau, and two poetry collections, Primitive and Ashland. She lives in Toronto.

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      Book preview

      Ashland - Gil Adamson

      Copyright © Gil Adamson, 2011

      Published by ECW Press

      2120 Queen Street East, Suite 200, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4E 1E2

      416-694-3348 / info@ecwpress.com

      All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any process electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise — without the prior written permission of the copyright owners and ECW Press. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

      Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

      Adamson, Gil

      Ashland / Gil Adamson.

      Poems.

      ISBN 978-1-55490-985-8

      Also Issued As:

      978-1-55490-939-1 (PDF); 978-1-77041-015-2 (PBK)

      I. Title.

      PS8551.D3256A78 2011 C811'.54 C2010-906739-8

      Editor for the press: Michael Holmes / a misFit book

      Cover design: David Gee

      Text Design: Tania Craan

      Typesetting: Troy Cunningham

      The publication of Ashland has been generously supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $20.1 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada, by the Ontario Arts Council, by the Government of Ontario through Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit, by the OMDC Book Fund, an initiative of the Ontario Media Development Corporation, and by the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund.

      To Kit

      Death is what the living carry with them. A state of dread, like some uncanny foretaste of a bitter memory. But the dead do not remember and nothingness is not a curse. Far from it.

      — Cormac McCarthy, Suttree

      Vigil

      The train was unable to stop until after the man named Verken was struck. Humming on its track of snow stars, it burst open the unhappy man, scraped up a new nightfall for us all.

      Mrs. Dumont has slashed herself across her withered thigh. Two young people recently married are now indifferent to one another. The oldest trees on our main street are dying, all five together. Half the mines are closing due to extreme cold. The men cry over their starved children, bludgeon their wives out of sheer pity, bury them in barrels and pillow cases.

      No man or woman is so dear that Ashland will suffer

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