I append below the publicity info on he late Roy Kiyooka's 
transcanadaletters & Pacific Rim Letters, the former a new edition of a 
classic text, the latter a volume he left behind at his death: these 
are poem missives, amazing reports from the front lines of art.

Transcanada Letters
Roy Kiyooka
Afterword by Glen Lowry

Pacific Rim Letters
Roy Kiyooka
Edited, and with an Afterword by,
Smaro Kamboureli

Transcanada Letters by Roy Kiyooka was a landmark when it first 
appeared in 1975. This new edition, in combination with its sequel, 
Pacific Rim Letters, published now for the first time, will bring into 
circulation two outstanding literary documents. These volumes will 
offer a new generation of readers the opportnity to discover one of the 
most significant artistic and literary figures of Canada's modern 
cultural history.
	Transcanada Letters, which includes letters Kiyooka wrote from 1966 to 
1975, and Pacific Rim Letters, a gathering of letters he wrote between 
1975 and 1985, are not the typical collection of letters we have come 
to expect from artists and authors. They present a fascinating and 
highly valuable picture of the artistic and literary communities 
Kiyooka was actively involved with, as well as Kiyooka as a man with an 
extraordinary intellect and passion for life and the arts. Kiyooka 
takes the epistolary form into new and radical directions. At once 
tenderly estranged and confessional, attentive as much to the minutiae 
of daily life as to the complexities of artistic and literary creation, 
and embedded in the politics of culture-making and those of racialized 
identities, these letters are a literary achievement in their own 
right.
	Marvelously crafted, these two volumes are at once personal meditation 
and cultural manifesto, travel diaries and love missives, testimonials 
of friendship and dispatches from the creative front.

Bio:
Roy Kenzie Kiyooka was born in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan in 1926. He 
achieved high regard as one of Canada's most important avant-garde 
painters, teaching at several universities during his career. Author of 
the recently celebrated biography Mothertalk: Life Stories of Mary 
Kiyosha Kiyooka, and Pear Tree Pomes, which was nominated for a 
Governor General's Literary Award. In 1978, Kiyooka was named an 
Officer of the Order of Canada. He died in 1994 at the age of 68.


FROM PACIFIC RIM LETTERS BACK COVER:
"Pacific Rim Letters, alongside its earlier companion volume, 
Transcanada
Letters, postmarks Roy Kiyooka's 20-year letter-writing project as one 
of the
most unique manifestos of epistolatory poetics in the past fifty years. 
This
extraordinarily innovative and expansive painter, photographer, writer, 
and
musician used the letter as a form to explore and develop a domestic
aesthetic that addresses the daily life of the artist at work, the 
quotidian
correspondences of business, community, and the imagination. The 
narrative
threads through these missives deliver a gripping biotext of a 
racialized
and hyphenated Canadian artist 'leaping cultural fences’' and rapping 
out to
the 'myriad extensions' of the 'mundane self.' And Smaro Kamboureli's 
editing,
together with her Afterword, is a critically useful zip code of the 
particular
context and nuances of this outstanding dispatch of Canadian cultural 
history."
-Fred Wah, author of Diamond Grill and Faking It: Poetics and Hybridity,
Critical Writing 1984-1999, and Governor General's Award recipient

"Kiyooka emerges from this 'biography of self ' as a polymath, utterly 
at ease
in the arenas of language, image, and sound. His letters run a range 
from
the poetic to the hard-nosed, and the man who emerges from their verbal
intricacies is both splendid and heartbreaking. In Kiyooka's own fine 
phrase,
they are 'a wanton correspondence.' In 1976 he introduced himself at a 
poetry
reading by saying, 'this will be my strut for all those keen ears out 
there.'
He was a man of his words: when he walks the walk, as readers we are all
ears. To use one of Kiyooka's favourite words, Pacific Rim Letters is an
'epiphany’' an 'epiphany' that holds us enthralled."
-Robert Enright, University Research Professor in Art Criticism at the
University of Guelph and Senior Contributing Editor to Border Crossings

Roy K. Kiyooka (1926-1994) was a renowned painter, photographer, poet,
and avid letter-writer. His posthumous publications include Pacific
Windows: Collected Poems of Roy K. Kiyooka, edited by Roy Miki, and
Mothertalk: Life Stories of Mary Kiyoshi Kiyooka, edited by Daphne 
Marlatt.

ORDERING INFORMATION:
Transcanada Letters: 1-896300-68-5 * $34.95 CDN * $28.95 US
Pacific Rim Letters: 1-896300-70-7  * $34.95 CDN * $28.95 US

Available in bookstores.

To order through LitDistCo:
[log in to unmask]
Phone: 1-800-591-6250
Fax: 1-800-591-6251

To order through NeWest Press:
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Phone: 1-866-796-5473
Fax: 780-433-3179
Visit www.newestpress.com for more info.

I can't recommend these two volumes highly enough (admitting that, yes, 
I am a member of the NeWest board).

Doug


Douglas Barbour
11655 - 72 Avenue NW
Edmonton  Ab  T6G 0B9
(780) 436 3320

	-- bring lust into the library
or it is hell.
		Lisa Robertson