St. John's College Library: General Information

In Degrees of Failure, sociologist Randle Nelsen brings together such diverse topics as campus parking, college sports, helicopter parents, edu-business as edu-tainment, and technology in teaching to show how continuing inequities, grounded in large part upon social class differences, are maintained and reproduced in our universities. Paying special attention to the role played by professors in solidifying status-quo arrangements, Nelsen makes the strange familiar for those outside the university bureaucracy and the familiar strange for those whose participation in university settings is a routine part of everyday life.

Edward Byrne's Duets consists of interpretative translations of sonnets by Louise Labé, who lived and wrote in sixteenth-century Lyon, and those by thirteenth-century Florentine Guido Cavalcanti. In the case of Labé, the twenty-four sonnets - twenty-three in French, one in Italian - constitute a narrative sequence chronicling the duration of an intense love affair. In the case of Cavalcanti, the sonnets are not sequential, but have been selected from the most explicitly philosophical of his sonnets - those which demonstrate his "radical Aristotelianism." In both cases, one of a pre-Petrarchan poet, the other post-Petrarchan, love is represented as both a wildness, madness, or malady and as something that gives rise to speculation regarding the relationship between body and intellect. The reader will find herein ninety poems, equally "translations" of Labé and Cavalcanti and "versions" authored by Byrne. Each sonnet is made up of nine lines, each line, in turn, made up of nine syllables. The work's main body is written in the manner of the serial poem, a practice whereby the composing mind passes from room to room - and from stanza to stanza - in a kind of trance, forgetting and remembering. A distant but undeniable antecedent to this practice, in the context of translation, can be found in Robin Blaser's masterful translation of Gérard de Nerval's LesChimères. The second version of Louise Labé's sonnet sequence was translated from Rilke's German version, using Labé's Middle French text as a 'pony.' Interspersed within, or intervening in, the translations are "sonnets" by Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, Marcel Proust, and Jacques Lacan. Between the main translations, readers will discover a sequence of wild sonnets, or nonets, taken from a separate collaboration of Byrne's with Kim Minkus, and a handful of sonnets by Labé's contemporaneous admirers - members of her salon, such as Maurice Scève and Clément Marot.

Three decades of poetic perambulations have given SM a variegated view of family and friendship, grief and jubilation, politics and philosophy, sex and love. Her first collection since 2010, McMaster finds renewed inspiration in themes of aging, holding on to love and desire, and immersing herself in the real natural world to keep from spiralling into the existential despair which is the realization of death coming for us all.

Leonard Cohen is one of the great writers, performers, and most consistently daring artists of our time. Book of Longing is Cohen’s eagerly awaited new collection of poems, following his highly acclaimed 1984 title, Book of Mercy, and his hugely successful 1993 publication, Stranger Music, a Globe and Mail national bestseller. Book of Longing contains erotic, playful, and provocative line drawings and artwork on every page, by the author, which interact in exciting and unexpected ways on the page with poetry that is timeless, meditative, and at times darkly humorous. The book brings together all the elements that have brought Leonard Cohen’s artistry with language worldwide recognition.

One of the best-known experimental novels of the 1960s, Beautiful Losers is Leonard Cohen' s most defiant and uninhibited work. As imagined by Cohen, hell is an apartment in Montreal, where a bereaved and lust-tormented narrator reconstructs his relations with the dead. In that hell two men and a woman twine impossibly and betray one another again and again. Memory blurs into blasphemous sexual fantasy--and redemption takes the form of an Iroquois saint and virgin who has been dead for 300 years but still has the power to save even the most degraded of her suitors. First published in 1966, Beautiful Losers demonstrates that its author is not only a superb songwriter but also a novelist of visionary power. Funny, harrowing, and fiercely moving, it is a classic erotic tragedy, incandescent in its prose and exhilarating for its risky union of sexuality and faith.

Popular since its original publication more than 25 years ago, Leonard Cohen's classic book of contemporary psalms is now beautifully repackaged.   Internationally celebrated for his writing and his music, Leonard Cohen is revered as one of the great writers, performers, and most consistently daring artists of our time. Now beautifully repackaged, the poems in Book of Mercy brim with praise, despair, anger, doubt and trust. Speaking from the heart of the modern world, yet in tones that resonate with an older devotional tradition, these verses give voice to our deepest, most powerful intuitions.

A collection of poetry and prose interspersed with lyrics, discursive passages, and diary extracts from the legendary Canadian songwriter-poet   First published in 1978, the theme of this insightful and moving poetry collection is love with all its dilemmas. It is largely autobiographical in tone, offering the reader insights into Cohen's private world. From the 1950s and 1960s onward, Cohen's mournful, thought-provoking lyrics and poems have formed the backdrop to the musings of generations; this reissue, following on the huge success of his 2009 concerts, extends the experience to yet more new readers.

Praised as "brilliantly revelatory...a masterful work of critical journalism" (Kirkus Reviews, starred review), The Holy or the Broken is the fascinating account of one of the most-performed rock songs in history--Leonard Cohen's heartrending "Hallelujah." How did one obscure song become an international anthem for human triumph and tragedy, a song each successive generation seems to feel they have discovered and claimed as uniquely their own? Celebrated music journalist Alan Light follows the improbable journey of "Hallelujah" straight to the heart of popular culture.

Singer/songwriter Leonard Cohen is one of the most important and influential musical artists of the past fifty years--and one of the most elusive. In I'm Your Man, journalist Sylvie Simmons, one of the foremost chroniclers of the world of rock 'n' roll and popular music, explores the extraordinary life and creative genius of Leonard Cohen. I'm Your Man is an intimate and insightful appreciation of the man responsible for "Suzanne," "Bird on a Wire," "Hallelujah," and so many other unforgettable, oft-covered ballads and songs.  Based on Simmons's unparalleled access to Cohen--and written with her hallmark blend of intelligence, integrity, and style--I'm Your Man is the definitive biography of a major musical artist widely considered in a league with the great Bob Dylan. Readers of Life by Rolling Stone Keith Richards and Patti Smith's phenomenal Just Kids will be riveted by this fascinating portrait of a singular musical icon.

Profiling Canada's leading poet-singer, this concise biography surveys the remarkable 40-year career of Leonard Cohen that has produced 11 books and 11 records. Focusing on the evolution of Cohen's international reputation, the book begins with a review of the Montreal years. The popularity of works like The Spice Box of Earth and Beautiful Losers is examined in detail. Cohen's musical career receives special attention, from his first studio session to his latest record. The biography concludes with a discussion of Stranger Music.