Soft Zipper by George Bowering

Soft Zipper: Objects, Food, Rooms

  • Non-Fiction
  • 160 pages, 5×8 inches
  • Price: $19 CAD · $17 USD
  • ISBN: 9781554201723
  • Date published: 2021-03-25
  • Availability: in print & available

 

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About Soft Zipper

This engaging memoir relates stories about George Bowering's small-town BC upbringing and his parents — his father long dead and his mother more recently passed on at the age of 100 — while at the same time honouring the author's other “parents”: Gertrude Stein, Charles Olson, and Roland Barthes.

Borrowing a structure and some precepts about writing from Stein, Bowering remains true to his inimitable self, relating his recollections and observations, his ever-curious mind travelling across the decades as he recounts some of the objects, food, rooms, and people that have shaped his engagement with the world. Charles Olson's ideas about proprioception shape Bowering's approach to himself as “an object among objects” (and, with increasing age and frailty, even one containing numerous objects), while Roland Barthes's writing strategies also make themselves felt throughout.

But these stories wear their learning lightly — it's ridiculously easy to enjoy these wise and gentle reminiscences of an older writer who spent his childhood in sunny South Okanagan, without even noticing the carefully wrought structure.

Lisa Robertson (The Baudelaire Fractal, The Weather, Cinema of the Present, 3 Summers, &c.), herself a student of George Bowering, provides an introduction to this deceptively simple and richly rewarding work by an old master.

Soft Zipper launched live on Zoom on Sunday June 27, alongside Could Be. Check out the event video below.

About George Bowering

George Bowering is a poet, novelist, memorist, essayist, critic, and legend of Canadian letters. He is Canada's first Parliamentary Poet Laureate and a two-time G-G winner. Of his 100-plus books, his most recent include: Writing and Reading (essays, 2019), No One (fiction, 2018), Ten Women (stories, 2015), Some End (poetry, 2018), and The World, I Guess (poetry, 2015).

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More books by George Bowering

Burning Water by George Bowering Shoot! by George Bowering The Box by George Bowering Caprice by George Bowering Words, Words, Words by George Bowering The World, I Guess by George Bowering A Short Sad Book by George Bowering Some End / West Broadway by George Bowering Writing and Reading by George Bowering Could Be by George Bowering