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Book TitleBuy Now From CommonWord

Wonder-Work

Selected Sonnets of Catharina Regina von Greiffenberg
Translated by Joanne Epp, Sally Ito, and Sarah Klassen

POETRY / LITERATURE IN TRANSLATION / 17th CENTURY STUDIES
November 2023 |  168 pages | 5½ x 8 paper | $30.00
ISBN 978-1-987986-14-3
includes Introduction to Greiffenberg's Life & Work, Translators' Afterword, and Bibliography

An unusual poet from the Baroque period meets 21st century poet-translators in this exceptional book. Catharina Regina von Greiffenberg's intense devotional poems are matched with innovative and moving new English versions from Canadians Epp, Ito, and Klassen. This is astonishing Metaphysical poetry: original, provocative, reverent.

The translators have chosen 65 poems from 300 in Greiffenberg's best-known work, Geistliche Sonette, Lieder und Gedichte. The sonnets in Wonder-Work are presented in both German and English.

Not only in distress and death, but in my very mouth
my beloved gives himself to me in sweetness.
His blood, inflamed by love, shall quiet my heart’s heat.
I kiss and eat him out of love, here in my throat.
He could not be more closely wed with me.
On Reverently Receiving The Most Holy Supper (2)

Catharina Regina von Greiffenberg (1633–1694), considered one of the most noteworthy German-language poets of the seventeenth century, was born into a family of the Protestant nobility in Austria midway through the Thirty Years’ War. Unusually well-educated for a woman of her time, she read widely and learned several languages. After experiencing a spiritual awakening as a young adult, she resolved to glorify God through her writing. Her works include a volume of poetry and three volumes of meditations on the life, suffering, and death of Christ.

About the translators: Joanne Epp is a Winnipeg poet and musician with two published collections, Eigenheim (2015) and Cattail Skyline (2021). Sarah Klassen is a Winnipeg poet and fiction writer. Her first language was German, but she writes only in English. She has published four books of fiction and eight books of poetry; her upcoming New and Selected Poems is also published by CMU Press. Sally Ito is a poet and translator living in Winnipeg. Her first book of translated poetry, with Michiko Tsuboi, was Are You an Echo: The Lost Poetry of Misuzu Kaneko, published in 2016. Her own latest collection, Heart’s Hydrography, was published in 2022.

   
Book TitleBuy Now From CommonWord

On Mennonite/s Writing: Selected Essays

Hildi Froese Tiessen
edited and with an Introduction by Robert Zacharias

LITERARY CRITICISM / MENNONITE STUDIES
December 2023 |  318 pages | 6 x 9 paper | $34.00
Index, bibliography, 9 photos
ISBN 978-1-987986-12-9

In 1973, Hildi Froese Tiessen published the first academic essay about Rudy Wiebe's fiction (included in this volume). Since then, in scholarly essays and talks, she has examined with great insight the literary careers of Di Brandt, Patrick Friesen, Julia Kasdorf, Sandra Birdsell, and David Waltner-Toews, as well as key origin figures like Arnold Dyck and Al Reimer. Dr. Froese Tiessen’s widely admired essays include several (among the first of their kind) which situate Mennonite literature in relation to postmodernism, as well as investigations of the sometimes disconcerting ethnic and theological assumptions about Mennonite artistic practice. The essays in On Mennonite/s Writing are the first solo collection of Dr. Tiessen’s writings, and she has written a major new piece especially for this publication.

Hildi Froese Tiessen is one of the foremost scholars of Mennonite literature today. Raised in Manitoba, Hildi Froese Tiessen earned a BA at the University of Winnipeg and an MA and PhD at the University of Alberta. She taught English and Peace & Conflict Studies (1987-2012) at Conrad Grebel University College, University of Waterloo, where she also served as academic dean. She is the editor of Liars and Rascals (1989), an anthology of short fiction by Mennonite authors and, with Paul Tiessen, After Green Gables: L.M. Montgomery's Letters to Ephraim Weber (2006).

"Hildi Froese Tiessen has played an essential role in the remarkable flowering of Mennonite/s writing over what is now half a century. The publication of this volume of her essays reveals anew the great generosity, critical acumen, and encyclopedic knowledge that Tiessen has offered to the Mennonite writing community—one that she has actively nurtured and guided into being over her long career as critic, editor, and organizer. This gathering is a great gift to anyone interested in that writing."

—Jeff Gundy, author of Walker in the Fog: On Mennonite Writing

New & Selected Poems
Lyrik Poetry Series 1

Sarah Klassen
Edited and with a new essay by Nathan Dueck

Coming in 2024 |  160 pages | paper | $20.00
ISBN  978-1-987986-13-6

Not yet published.

 

New & Selected Poems
Lyrik Poetry Series 2

John Weier
Edited by Nathan Dueck

Coming in 2024 |  120 pages | paper | $20.00
ISBN 978-1-987986-16-7

Not yet published.

 

New & Selected Poems
Lyrik Poetry Series 3

David Waltner-Toews
Edited by Nathan Dueck

Coming in 2024 |  120 pages | paper | $20.00
ISBN 978-1-987986-17-4

Not yet published.

 

Recent Releases

The Russian DaughterBuy Now from CommonWord

The Russian Daughter
A Novel

Sarah Klassen

November 2023 choice, Winnipeg Free Press Book Club – click here
Nominated for Margaret Laurence Award for Fiction – Manitoba Book Awards
 

2022 | 272 pages | 6 x 9 paper | $22.00 in Canada 
ISBN 978-1-987986-11-2

 Book Club Discussion Questions

Sarah Klassen's quiet, delicately written new novel is rooted in family, community, and everyday work—set in what is now Ukraine, during the years of the Russian Revolution. The Russian Daughter begins in an idyllic country village; there Amalia and Isaak Albrecht, a prosperous young Mennonite couple, long to have children. They hear of a Russian baby they can adopt; over the next years their family twists, alters, and faces very unexpected challenges.

At the novel’s centre is the surprising and defiant Sofia, the adopted Russian daughter, so unlike everyone around her and yet still loved. Shaken again and again by accidents, misapprehensions, and the fierce currents of history, the Albrecht family must seek to understand itself in new and demanding ways.

Sarah Klassen

Manitoba writer Sarah Klassen is the respected and acclaimed author of three previous works of fiction and eight collections of poetry. Her first book, in 1988, Journey to Yalta, won the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. Other awards include the Canadian Authors Association Poetry Award for A Curious Beatitude (2006). In 2014 Klassen's novel The Wittenbergs was the winner of the Margaret McWilliams Award for Popular History.

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Return Stroke Buy Now from CommonWord

Return Stroke:
essays & memoir

Dora Dueck
2022 | 248 pages | 6 x 9 paper | $20.00 in Canada
ISBN 978-1-987986-10-5

 Book Club Discussion Questions

These graceful, probing personal essays by award-winning fiction writer Dora Dueck engage with a diverse range of ideas (becoming a writer, motherhood, mortality, the ethics of biography, a child's coming-out) because in non-fiction, she writes, “the quest for meaning bows to the experience as it was.” Yet within Return Stroke, one theme in particular does resonate—change. “How wonderful,” the author writes, that our “bits of existence, no matter how ordinary, are available for further consideration—seeing patterns, facing into inevitable death, enjoying the playful circularity of then and now.”

The book’s title, Return Stroke—the title of one essay, where it literally refers to lightning—suggests such a dynamic: “When I send inquiry into my past, it sends something back to me.” The topic of memory, in all its malleability, impermanence, and surprising power, is especially central to the collection’s concluding piece, an absorbing memoir of the author’s 1980s life in the Paraguayan Chaco. Whether she is discovering the more meaningful part that imagination holds within her religious faith or relating with astonishing clarity and honesty the experience of giving birth away from her home country, Dora Dueck’s beautifully written essays and memoir make her an insightful and generous companion.

Dora Dueck

Dora Dueck is the author of four books of fiction, All That Belongs (2019), What You Get At Home (2013), This Hidden Thing (2010), and Under the Still Standing Sun (1989). Her novella Mask won the 2014 Malahat Review novella contest. This Hidden Thing was Book of the Year at the 2011 Manitoba Book Awards, while What You Get at Home won the High Plains Award for short fiction. A lay historian and former editor, Dueck grew up in Alberta, resided later in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Paraguay, and has retired to British Columbia. She and her late husband Helmut have three children and ten grandchildren. You can find Dora’s writing on her Borrowing Bones blog.

If you're in the USA, order from Bookshop.org:

Buy at Bookshop.org

 
 

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