Award-winning author Gary Barwin has written poems, novels and books for children. He’s composed music, created multimedia art and performed around the world. Now he has turned his talented pen to essays. In Imagining Imagining: Essays on Language, Identity and Infinity Barwin thinks deeply about big ideas: story and identity; art and death; how we communicate and why we dream. From his childhood home in Ireland to his long-time home in Hamilton, Barwin shares the thoughts that keep him up at night (literally) and the ideas that keep him creating. Filled with witty asides, wise stories and a generosity of spirit that is unmistakable, these are essays that readers will turn to again and again.
About the Author :
Gary Barwin is a writer, composer and multidisciplinary artist. He is the author of thirty books including Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted: The Ballad of Motl the Cowboy, which won the Canadian Jewish Literary Award, was shortlisted for the Vine Award and was chosen for Hamilton Reads 2023. His national bestselling novel Yiddish for Pirates won the Leacock Medal for Humour and the Canadian Jewish Literary Award, was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction and the Scotiabank Giller Prize and was long-listed for Canada Reads. His 2022 poetry collection, The Most Charming Creatures, won the Canadian Jewish Literary Award. Barwin was born in Northern Ireland of South African parents of Ashkenazi Lithuanian descent. He currently lives in Hamilton, Ontario, and at garybarwin.com.
Review :
"Barwin's best poems, like the underappreciated 'Shopping for Deer, ' are among the best poems ever written in this country, and this collection stands apart. Absolutely stellar and necessary."
- Winnipeg Free Press
"In No TV for Woodpeckers, Barwin engages and entertains the reader in a way that ensures some semblance of an environmental (re)orientation and immersion through energy, humour, and transformation."
- The Goose
"It makes sense that a Canadian writer born in Northern Ireland to South African Jewish parents of Lithuanian descent might ask 'Where is home?' and might write from and towards this question. But one soon discovers in Gary Barwin's Imagining Imagining that he not only finds his home in language but invites us into it with warmth, humour and a roving curiosity, sharing his own journeys in relation to words, to writing, to publishing. There is a Yiddish saying - 'the tongue is not in exile' - and Imagining Imagining, a generous work of home seeking and home building, invites us to speak the world into being together."
- David Naimon, Between the Covers podcast
"Reading Gary Barwin is like zipping from one awe-inspiring corner of the galaxy to the next and being privy to the intricate, inner connections of everything you see along the way. From life with beloved dogs through to ampersands, first kisses and the invisible, entangled bonds of diaspora, this book plays witness to the interconnected moments of our lives in all of their splendour and surprise. Barwin is a master at detailing the invisible - and sometimes unexpected - threads that illuminate and bind a life together, and reading this book will make you come away from it that much more appreciative of the threads that illuminate your own."
- Amanda Leduc, author of The Centaur's Wife and Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space
"What unites his diverse body of work is his interest in exploring recurring themes and myriad literary traditions in a variety of forms and registers. Depth, beauty, and spirituality glow from within Barwin's often surreal, always surprising lines."
- Antigonish Review
