The Clichéist

Amanda Lamarche's debut collection of poetry is a work of imaginative grace and power.

These poems topple the normal hierarchy of everyday concerns, promoting fears unlikely in the "normal" state of being--the fear of buttons, of dying to the wrong song, of houses built on corners--to the same stage and emotional impact as the more common (perhaps more clichéd) fears of car crashes and collapsing bridges.

The clever combination of explorations emotional and playful carries on. Technical advice for cutting down trees is juxtaposed with the development of ominous personal overtones. The title sequence takes issue with the easy laying down of language by recasting well-worn sayings: giving them back-stories, situating them in real time and real places, and reinvigorating them by providing each its own individual universe from which to draw meaning.

Amanda Lamarche's refreshing poems refuse at all the right moments to take themselves too seriously. They have the amazing ability to make readers shift from out-loud laughter to profound insight in a gasp of breath.
 
This writing is driven by an underlying, ineffable vitality, a legitimacy -- a sense that the words are locked inexorably in place and the poet knows it.
--Books in Canada
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Reading Amanda Lamarche's poetry, the slow burn of language gathers in us. Here's grace, wit, wisdom, courage -- what more could we ask for in a poet?
--Rhea Tregebov
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These shape-shifting, quick-witted poems resonate with the energy of their making; the opening section, "A Book of Fears," is one of the most compelling groups of poems I've read in a while. Amanda Lamarche puts both feet into the chilly waters of intuition, and she does so with levity and grace.
--Stephanie Bolster
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You know you are in for a wonderful set of poems when the first poem causes your heart to skip a beat ... There are no clichés in The Clichéist.
--Hannah Main-Van der Kamp, BC Bookworld
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Amanda Lamarche's book is called The Clichéist, a title that's not merely wry, but chances to name one of poetry's difficult and essential projects ... The book's first section, "Book of Fears," corresponds in content and structure to many existing lyric-poem phobia series ... Here, readers are introduced to Lamarche's capacity for teasing the humour, menace and tenderness from under the skin of relatively mundane images through diction and syntax that's both artful and playful ... The final, title section ... in which clichéd phrases--"Sleep With the Fishes," "No Man is an Island," etc.--are annotated by stories that seem both to have generated an instance of the cliché and been generated by it. The poems are cast in lines fragmented down the page, a kind of deconstruction of the founding principle of the cliché. Lamarche is good at this form; the poems read more interestingly for it.
--Karen Solie, Event
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... Lamarche portrays rural subjects whose verbal world is hard-edged, pocked with profanity, scorn-inflected and zigzaggedly musical. Here we find stories of smokers and drinkers, hunting town edge-dwellers, fishing dock sitters, rural inhabitants whose evening stroll might get them mauled by a bear.
--Margaret Christakos, ARC
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... there are lines and images throughout the book that peel away a part of the ordinary world and reveal it as new ... There is a familiar and yet utterly strange intimacy in [Lamarche's] words that I particularly admire."
--Heather Jessup, Malahat Review
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Accomplished and confident ... Lamarche says it with style. This is an exceptionally strong first book.
--Andrew Vaisius, Prairie Fire
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Junction
ISBN: 9780889712089
Paperback / softback
5.5 in x 8.0 in - 88 pp
Publication Date: 01/10/2005
BISAC Subject(s): POE011000-POETRY / Canadian