Human Voices Wake Us (2024)

Description

HUMAN VOICES WAKE US is an operatic romp of sparkling new works from Taylor Marie Graham, Kevin Andrew Heslop and Publius Fraxineus Tego, and illustrations by Andrés Garzon Espitia. From play excerpts to poetic monologues and dialogues, this anthology surveys wrestling with the disarranged landscape of sleep from which one is suddenly fastened open and expected to act, or may drown otherwise. Title from T.S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.

About The Authors

Taylor Marie Graham is an award-winning theatre creator, scholar, and educator who lives in Cambridge, Ontario / Haldimand Tract. She has an MFA in Creative Writing and a PhD in theatre studies at the University of Guelph. Currently, she teaches as a sessional English/theatre professor at Western University. You can find Taylor’s articles in Canadian Theatre Review, Intermission Magazine, Routledge’s Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance, The Conversation, and Canadian Literature. Her book Cottage Radio & Other Plays (Talonbooks) animates a wild cast of Southwestern Ontario characters—particularly its strong, hilarious rural women—with complex histories and relationships to the land. Both Taylor’s artistic and academic work often explores rural feminisms and the decolonization of bodies in space.

Of Kevin Andrew Heslop’s first book, the correct fury of your why is a mountain (Gordon Hill Press, 2021), his friend Dan said, “I didn’t get all the words in this, but it seems like he knows what he’s doing.” According to his friend Camille, Kevin's first film, mo(u)vements. (Astoria Pictures/Rose Garden Press, 2023), “is a remarkably collaborative, politically urgent, vibrant and visceral poetic-filmic anthology which locates its complex thematics in the sociopolitical underbelly of contemporary ‘Canada.’” So there. Kevin’s next book, a hometown conversation of Medical Assistance in Dying, will appear with Gordon Hill Press in 2025.

I, Publius Fraxineus Tego am not the seer of sounds who had aimed his spirit at the secrets of the chromogram in Latin class, nor he who with dilated pupils read Vergil in the dark, nor am I the one who sat on a bench and began an inconsistent and benighted reverie spanning and consuming 20 years of angst, doubt, and loss; I am not a poet of any repute, nor a man with any technical skills, political power, or inherited wealth: I am not the editor of this work you read, nor am I its author. Vale.

Specifications

ISBN: 978-1-0689134-0-2
75 pp., 6” H x 8.25” W
Bound via metal fastener in a cover of (green or peach) handmade recycled cotton paper with a flyleaf of (pastel or green) kozo Thai mulberry paper.