Body of Text

(Book*hug, 2008)
ART 386

Body of Text is a collection of concrete poems made by marrying poetry with body-based performance art and documentary photography. Dressed in a full black body-suit, Michael V. Smith is photographed by David Ellingsen in hundreds of poses which resemble Greco-Roman letters, Asian characters, hieroglyphs, or Rorschach inkblots. These are then arranged in book form, to a maximum of three images per page. In the same spirit of moving beyond language as heard in the sound poetry of Christian Bök, the poems in Body of Text occupy a liminal space between poetry and visual art. The body is made word, is made site, object and subject. The body is symbol.

(Description Source: Book*hug)

Author

Michael V. Smith is an associate professor at the University of British Columbia, where he teaches creative writing. His first novel, Cumberland, was shortlisted for the Amazon.ca / Books in Canada First Novel Award. His short fiction has won the Western Magazine Gold Award for Fiction and been nominated for the Journey Prize. In 2007, Smith received the Dayne Ogilvie Award for Emerging Gay Writers and Vancouver’s Community Hero of the Year Award. A native of Cornwall, Ontario, Smith currently lives in Kelowna, BC.

UBC Library Holdings

https://tinyurl.com/yxnzgptp

How to Purchase this Book

From the Publisher – Book*hug
From Used-book Sellers – ABE, Amazon, Antiqbook, Biblio, Vialibri

Paper ISBN: 9781897388280

UBC Okanagan Classroom Artwork Project

The University of British Columbia Okanagan Classroom Artwork Project aims to display academically inspiring artwork in classrooms and other teaching areas of the university.

Artwork displayed as part of this project – including the covers of books and journals containing work written or edited by UBCO scholars and researchers – is intended to help enliven university teaching spaces, educate classroom users about the connections between research and teaching, and introduce members of the broader public to some of the research and scholarship carried out at UBCO.

How to Submit Artwork

If you know of other book or journal covers, or other academically inspiring artwork that is connected to work carried out by UBCO artists, scholars or researchers and that is consistent with UBCO’s educational mission, please email your suggestions to classroom.artwork@ubc.ca.

The UBC Okanagan Classroom Artwork Project began in 2019 with support from the Irving K. Barber School of Arts and Sciences. It is now a joint project of UBCO’s Faculties and the Office of the Provost.

Artwork and other images that are a part of this project are displayed solely for educational purposes.

My Body is Yours

(Arsenal Pulp Press, 2015)
ART 376

Michael V. Smith is a multihyphenate force of nature: a novelist, poet, improv comic, filmmaker, drag queen, performance artist, and occasional clown. In this, his first work of nonfiction, Michael traces his early years as an inadequate male–a fey kid growing up in a small town amid a blue-collar family; a sissy; an insecure teenager desperate to disappear; and an obsessive writer-performer, drawn to compulsions of alcohol, sex, reading, spending, work, and art as a means to cope and heal.

As an artist whose work focuses on our preconceived notions about the body, Michael questions the very notion of what it means to be human. He also asks: How can we know what a man is? How might understanding gender as metaphor be a tool for a deeper understanding of identity? In coming to terms with his past “failures” at masculinity, and with an aging father he is only beginning to come to know, Michael offers a new way of thinking about breaking out of gender norms, and reconciling with a dangerous childhood.

(Description Source: Arsenal Pulp Press)

Author

Michael V. Smith is an associate professor at the University of British Columbia, where he teaches creative writing. His first novel, Cumberland, was shortlisted for the Amazon.ca / Books in Canada First Novel Award. His short fiction has won the Western Magazine Gold Award for Fiction and been nominated for the Journey Prize. In 2007, Smith received the Dayne Ogilvie Award for Emerging Gay Writers and Vancouver’s Community Hero of the Year Award. A native of Cornwall, Ontario, Smith currently lives in Kelowna, BC.

UBC Library Holdings

https://tinyurl.com/yxnzgptp

How to Purchase this Book

From the Publisher – Arsenal Pulp Press
From Used-book Sellers – ABE, Amazon, Antiqbook, Biblio, Vialibri

Paper ISBN: 9781551525778

UBC Okanagan Classroom Artwork Project

The University of British Columbia Okanagan Classroom Artwork Project aims to display academically inspiring artwork in classrooms and other teaching areas of the university.

Artwork displayed as part of this project – including the covers of books and journals containing work written or edited by UBCO scholars and researchers – is intended to help enliven university teaching spaces, educate classroom users about the connections between research and teaching, and introduce members of the broader public to some of the research and scholarship carried out at UBCO.

How to Submit Artwork

If you know of other book or journal covers, or other academically inspiring artwork that is connected to work carried out by UBCO artists, scholars or researchers and that is consistent with UBCO’s educational mission, please email your suggestions to classroom.artwork@ubc.ca.

The UBC Okanagan Classroom Artwork Project began in 2019 with support from the Irving K. Barber School of Arts and Sciences. It is now a joint project of UBCO’s Faculties and the Office of the Provost.

Artwork and other images that are a part of this project are displayed solely for educational purposes.

Niagara Motel

(Arsenal Pulp Press, 2016)
ART 386

(Description Source: Arsenal Pulp Press)

Author

Ashley Little received a BFA in Creative Writing and Film Studies from the University of Victoria and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia. Her book The New Normal won the Sheila A. Egoff Children’s Literature Prize, and Anatomy of a Girl Gang won the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, was a finalist for the City of Vancouver Book Award, longlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and has been optioned for television. Confessions of a Teenage Leper is Ashley’s fifth novel. Ashley lives in British Columbia with her partner, their daughter, and her toy poodle, Huxley.

UBC Library Holdings

https://tinyurl.com/y6o5mz5o

How to Purchase this Book

From the Publisher – Arsenal Pulp Press
From Used-book Sellers – ABE, Amazon, Antiqbook, Biblio, Vialibri

Paper ISBN: 9781551526607

UBC Okanagan Classroom Artwork Project

The University of British Columbia Okanagan Classroom Artwork Project aims to display academically inspiring artwork in classrooms and other teaching areas of the university.

Artwork displayed as part of this project – including the covers of books and journals containing work written or edited by UBCO scholars and researchers – is intended to help enliven university teaching spaces, educate classroom users about the connections between research and teaching, and introduce members of the broader public to some of the research and scholarship carried out at UBCO.

How to Submit Artwork

If you know of other book or journal covers, or other academically inspiring artwork that is connected to work carried out by UBCO artists, scholars or researchers and that is consistent with UBCO’s educational mission, please email your suggestions to classroom.artwork@ubc.ca.

The UBC Okanagan Classroom Artwork Project began in 2019 with support from the Irving K. Barber School of Arts and Sciences. It is now a joint project of UBCO’s Faculties and the Office of the Provost.

Artwork and other images that are a part of this project are displayed solely for educational purposes.

The New Normal
Korean translation

(See & Talk Publishing Co. Ltd, 2015)
ART 376

Tamar Robinson knows a lot about loss―more than any teenager should. Her younger sisters are dead, her parents are adrift in a sea of grief, and now Tamar is losing her hair. Nevertheless, she navigates her rocky life as best she can, not always with grace, but with her own brand of twisted humour. She joins the chess club with her friend Roy, earns a part in the school production of The Wizard of Oz, buys an awesome wig, lands a crappy job, gets invited to the prom (by three different guys!) and helps her parents re-enter the land of the living. What Tamar lacks in tact (and hair), she makes up for in sheer tenacity.

(Description Source: Orca Books)

Author

Ashley Little received a BFA in Creative Writing and Film Studies from the University of Victoria and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia. Her book The New Normal won the Sheila A. Egoff Children’s Literature Prize, and Anatomy of a Girl Gang won the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, was a finalist for the City of Vancouver Book Award, longlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and has been optioned for television. Confessions of a Teenage Leper is Ashley’s fifth novel. Ashley lives in British Columbia with her partner, their daughter, and her toy poodle, Huxley.

UBC Library Holdings

https://tinyurl.com/yyelhh6s

How to Purchase this Book

From the Publisher – Orca Books (English)
From Used-book Sellers – ABE, Amazon, Antiqbook, Biblio, Vialibri

Paper ISBN: 9781459800748
PDF ISBN: 9781459800755
ePub ISBN: 9781459800762

UBC Okanagan Classroom Artwork Project

The University of British Columbia Okanagan Classroom Artwork Project aims to display academically inspiring artwork in classrooms and other teaching areas of the university.

Artwork displayed as part of this project – including the covers of books and journals containing work written or edited by UBCO scholars and researchers – is intended to help enliven university teaching spaces, educate classroom users about the connections between research and teaching, and introduce members of the broader public to some of the research and scholarship carried out at UBCO.

How to Submit Artwork

If you know of other book or journal covers, or other academically inspiring artwork that is connected to work carried out by UBCO artists, scholars or researchers and that is consistent with UBCO’s educational mission, please email your suggestions to classroom.artwork@ubc.ca.

The UBC Okanagan Classroom Artwork Project began in 2019 with support from the Irving K. Barber School of Arts and Sciences. It is now a joint project of UBCO’s Faculties and the Office of the Provost.

Artwork and other images that are a part of this project are displayed solely for educational purposes.

Anatomy of a Girl Gang (Crne Ruže)
Croatian Translation

(EPH Media, 2015)
ART 206

A sharply observed novel narrated in six voices, Anatomy of a Girl Gang is the powerful exploration of a young girl gang in Vancouver called the Black Roses: Mac, the self-appointed leader and mastermind; Mercy, the Punjabi princess with a skill for theft; Kayos, their former classmate who gave birth to a daughter at age thirteen; Sly Girl, who fled her reserve for a better life, only to find depravity and addiction; and Z, a sixteen-year-old anti-establishment graffiti artist.

Cast out by mainstream society, the five girls terrorize Vancouver with a primal, restless urgency. Told with shocking and at times brutal honesty, Anatomy of a Girl Gang is a vivid and unnerving story of urban girl culture.

(Description Source: Arsenal Pulp Press)

Author

UBC Library Holdings

https://tinyurl.com/y2lfsstd

How to Purchase this Book

From the Publisher – Arsenal Pulp Press
From Used-book Sellers – ABE, Amazon, Antiqbook, Biblio, Vialibri

Paper ISBN: 9781551525297

UBC Okanagan Classroom Artwork Project

The University of British Columbia Okanagan Classroom Artwork Project aims to display academically inspiring artwork in classrooms and other teaching areas of the university.

Artwork displayed as part of this project – including the covers of books and journals containing work written or edited by UBCO scholars and researchers – is intended to help enliven university teaching spaces, educate classroom users about the connections between research and teaching, and introduce members of the broader public to some of the research and scholarship carried out at UBCO.

How to Submit Artwork

If you know of other book or journal covers, or other academically inspiring artwork that is connected to work carried out by UBCO artists, scholars or researchers and that is consistent with UBCO’s educational mission, please email your suggestions to classroom.artwork@ubc.ca.

The UBC Okanagan Classroom Artwork Project began in 2019 with support from the Irving K. Barber School of Arts and Sciences. It is now a joint project of UBCO’s Faculties and the Office of the Provost.

Artwork and other images that are a part of this project are displayed solely for educational purposes.

Bad Ideas

(Nightwood Editions, 2017)
ART 202

Nobody knows bad ideas quite like Michael V. Smith. In his new collection of poetry, he speaks to an intangibility of sense, or a sense beyond the rational. Bad Ideas explores the inevitability of loss and triumph with characteristic irony and tenderness. Through this dazzling collection of a remembered life, hung out to ogle like laundry on the line, Smith recalls a mother who discovers a sex tape, a man who dreams of birthing his own son and a woman who blends her baby girls into milkshakes.

Bad Ideas is a testament to how an altered perspective effects change, how stories can be recast. The collection forms itself into an exercise in which optimism is a practiced art recaptured in dreams and prayers and combined to acknowledge the unknowable, the contradictory, the ungraspable: “An evening is composed / in a hundred unchoreographed / dramas”; “I transform, dressed as a monk / in burgundy and gold robes. I think / this will protect me, but it doesn’t”; “Dear Hatred, sweet / Hatred, do you not move our enemies / to know us better?” Hyperbolic and sincere, this collection brawls with the unquantifiable themes of family, loneliness and love.

(Description Source: Harbour Publishing)

Author

Michael V. Smith is an associate professor at the University of British Columbia, where he teaches creative writing. His first novel, Cumberland, was shortlisted for the Amazon.ca / Books in Canada First Novel Award. His short fiction has won the Western Magazine Gold Award for Fiction and been nominated for the Journey Prize. In 2007, Smith received the Dayne Ogilvie Award for Emerging Gay Writers and Vancouver’s Community Hero of the Year Award. A native of Cornwall, Ontario, Smith currently lives in Kelowna, BC.

UBC Library Holdings

https://tinyurl.com/y2q9dt8h

How to Purchase this Book

From the Publisher – Harbour Publishing – Nightwood Editions
From Used-book Sellers – ABE, Amazon, Antiqbook, Biblio, Vialibri

Paper ISBN: 9780889713260

UBC Okanagan Classroom Artwork Project

The University of British Columbia Okanagan Classroom Artwork Project aims to display academically inspiring artwork in classrooms and other teaching areas of the university.

Artwork displayed as part of this project – including the covers of books and journals containing work written or edited by UBCO scholars and researchers – is intended to help enliven university teaching spaces, educate classroom users about the connections between research and teaching, and introduce members of the broader public to some of the research and scholarship carried out at UBCO.

How to Submit Artwork

If you know of other book or journal covers, or other academically inspiring artwork that is connected to work carried out by UBCO artists, scholars or researchers and that is consistent with UBCO’s educational mission, please email your suggestions to classroom.artwork@ubc.ca.

The UBC Okanagan Classroom Artwork Project began in 2019 with support from the Irving K. Barber School of Arts and Sciences. It is now a joint project of UBCO’s Faculties and the Office of the Provost.

Artwork and other images that are a part of this project are displayed solely for educational purposes.