The Authors Book Club

Connecting readers and authors in Canada
  • Welcome!
  • About Us
  • Blog Feed
  • Invite An Author
  • Book Clubs
  • Resources
  • FAQ
  • News, Events, etc.
  • Contact
  • Tag: Paul Legault

    • The Spotlight Series: THE TOWER by Paul Legault

      Posted at 2:00 pm by TheAuthorsBookClub
      May 7th

      Featuring Coach House Books

      To kick off National Poetry month in April, we turned to Paul Legault to share an excerpt and a reflection on a poem from his new collection, The Tower, for our Weekend Poetry series. Read on below for what he had to share!

      “A Prayer for My Dog” is based on a W. B. Yeats poem titled “A Prayer for My Son”. Basically, the mystical Irish senator prays for a guardian angel to watch over his crying baby (so he can get some sleep). I don’t have a son, but in the great queer literary tradition (see: Gertrude Stein’s Basket) I have a dog.

      Joseph and I got a puppy when we moved in together in Bushwick, right after Enlightened was cancelled, so we named her Laura Dern. What else do you need to know about this poem? In The Walking Dead, my favorite actor on the show, Danai Gurira, plays a katana-wielding badass. What else? There’s this beautiful W. S. Merwin poem called “Place” that starts “On the last day of the world / I would want to plant a tree.” 

      Love makes you think about the apocalypse, because it gives you this mission: protection, which is to say the protection of your loved ones against the worst thing that can happen. I wish there were guardians to protect everyone on the Earth. We’re in the midst of a pandemic. There is a climate crisis that threatens to kill millions more. Trees and we are in a bad position. It is easy to love animals. They just are. Us too.

      Paul Legault

      Get your copy of The Tower here! 


      Paul Legault is the author of The Madeleine Poems (Omnidawn, 2010), The Other Poems (Fence, 2011), The Emily Dickinson Reader: An English-to-English Translation of the Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (McSweeney’s, 2012), Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror 2 (Fence, 2016), and Lunch Poems 2 (Spork, 2018). He also co-edited The Sonnets: Translating and Rewriting Shakespeare (Nightboat, 2012).

      Visit Paul’s website. Connect with him on Twitter and Instagram.

      Posted in Guest Authors, Recommended Books | Tagged Coach House Books, Paul Legault, poetry, The Authors' Book Club
    • For up-to-date info, see us on Twitter

      My Tweets
    • Also see us on Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube

      • Instagram
      • Facebook
      • YouTube
    • For a list of Blog Posts, see the tab ‘NEWS, EVENTS, ETC.’

      • My life as a reader
      • Plots & Pandemic: Virtual Meet & Greet with Ann Y.K. Choi
      • Plots & Pandemic: Virtual Meet & Greet with Dennis Bock
      • Plots & Pandemic: Virtual Meet & Greet with Farzana Doctor
      • Authors, tell us a bit about yourselves … (more author interviews!)
  • Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

  • Blog Posts by Month

    • February 2021
    • November 2020
    • October 2020
    • September 2020
    • August 2020
    • July 2020
    • June 2020
    • May 2020
    • April 2020
    • March 2020
    • February 2020
    • January 2020
  • Need this text translated?

Blog at WordPress.com.

Cancel

 
Loading Comments...
Comment
    ×