Flow: Poems Collected and New

A stunning collection from Governor General’s Award winner Roy Miki, Flow presents all of this critically acclaimed writer’s poetry – from his collections Saving Face, Random Access File, Surrender, There, and Mannequin Rising – as well as a substantial chapter of new, previously unpublished works. Including a foreword by poet and critic Louis Cabri, extensive interviews with Miki by the collection’s editor, Michael Barnholden, and an exhaustive bibliography, Flow is the definitive edition of Miki’s work. Also included are numerous full-colour photographs and photocollages, a practice Miki has become increasingly drawn to in recent years; in the book’s previously published sections and in the much-anticipated section of brand-new work, Miki’s poems and photographic works engage in a mutually enriching dialogue.

A Member of the Order of Canada and the Order of British Columbia, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, Roy Miki is one of Canada’s preeminent poets; he is also an influential critic, founder of the literary journal Line, and noted activist, instrumental in the movement for Japanese Canadian redress. All of Miki’s roles and concerns coalesce and interpollinate in his perceptive poems, which remain precisely attuned to the complex relationships between race, language, and power as they map and interrogate the layers of history enfolded within place and identity.

This is the fourth volume in a new series of collected works published by Talonbooks. The first three are Phyllis Webb’s Peacock Blue: The Collected Poems, Fred Wah’s Scree: The Collected Early Poems, 1962–1991, and Daphne Marlatt’s Intertidal: The Collected Earlier Poems, 1968–2008.

Roy Miki is an award-winning writer, poet, and critic who taught for many years at Simon Fraser University. He has written extensively on the work of bpNichol and edited Pacific Windows: Collected Poems of Roy K. Kiyooka, which won the 1997 Poetry Award from the Association of Asian American Studies. His major bibliographic study, A Record of Writing: An Annotated and Illustrated Bibliography of George Bowering, won the Gabrielle Roy Prize from the Association for Canadian and Québec Literatures as the best book on Canadian Literature of 1991. He was awarded the Governor General’s Award for Poetry for Surrender (2001). He is also the editor of Muriel Kitagawa’s This Is My Own: Letters to Wes and Other Writings on Japanese Canadians(1985); Tracing the Paths: Reading ≠ Writing The Martyrology (1988); and Meanwhile: The Critical Writings of bpNichol; and co-editor with Cassandra Kobayashi of Justice In Our Time: The Japanese Canadian Redress Settlement. Miki lives in Vancouver.

Michael Barnholden lives in Roberts Creek on the Sunshine Coast of British Columbia, where he writes, paints, carves, photographs, and does a little too much physical labour. Born in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, and raised in Toronto, he has lived in British Columbia since 1970 when he briefly attended Simon Fraser University. He has worked as a ranch hand, orchardist, youth worker, carpenter, publisher, editor, disability advocate, and, after returning to Simon Fraser University at age fifty-five to obtain a master’s degree in liberal studies, as sessional instructor and seminar leader at Emily Carr University. He was also educated at the Kootenay School of Writing, where he served on the collective starting in 1991. He co-edited Writing Class: The Kootenay School of Writing Anthology. His writing practice includes, but is not limited to, poetry, historical non-fiction, translation, and editing.