The Truth About Facts
$ 9.99 – $ 17.95
Longlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award
An A-to-Z compendium that finds the wonder in information overload.
The Truth About Facts makes intimate the seeming noise of information and facts by using the tradition of the alphabet book to get back to basics: to make room for wonder, devotion, and a reinvigorated role for poetry in both quick and methodological thought. Vautour leads his readers on an info-drenched, abecedarian jaunt that is both tongue-in-cheek and unquestionably earnest. Ranging from topics as assorted as Brazil Nuts and Juggling to meditations on Rememoration and the Zodiac, The Truth About Facts moves between the surety of aphorism and the anxieties of critique.
Bart Vautour is a writer, editor, and teacher. He is editor of the Throwback Series of books for Invisible Publishing and co-editor of a series of texts about Canada and the Spanish Civil War. He lives in K’jipuktuk/Halifax with his partner, daughter, and Marley the dog.
“The Truth about Facts subtly and satisfyingly illuminates already existing connections in the seemingly far-flung.”—Canadian Literature
“What is a fact? What is a poem? While a reconciliation of the two might seem scholarly and ambitious, you’ll find nothing but friendly invitations in The Truth About Facts. On this meandering journey through an alphabet of facts, you’ll encounter dementors and characters born of anagrams on the more lighthearted routes, while darker paths lead to lying US Presidents and racist exclusionary labour policies. Capital-f Facts and aphoristic lyrics dot these pages, stepping stones of thought that Vautour hops deftly across. Each poem reveals a smart and thoughtful mind in motion, and there is as much playfulness here as there is necessary critique. If, like me, you find yourself randomly clicking through Wikipedia articles late into the night, you will love this delightful ramble through the facts.”—Sachiko Murakami, finalist for the Governor General’s Award for English-language poetry
“There is a solid tradition of poets taking up the alphabet itself as their point of attack. But I have a hard time thinking of anyone who has done so with as much gusto as Bart Vautour. Following the wisdom of his daughter, through whose eyes and ears the alphabet is encountered anew, Vautour tracks factual and fictional subjects out of anagrammatical accident, on through dictionaries, histories, lexicons, and archives—a Borgenian infinite library we spiral through, as “hard facts” encrust the edges of the world’s ‘fake news.’ I want to call Vautour ‘the Glen Gould of poetry,’ and The Truth About Facts his unmatched alphabetical variations. There’s no jiggery-pokery here—just the worshipping of strange alphabetic gods. I am a convert. I believe every word of it.”—Stephen Collis, author of Once in Blockadia and DECOMP
Fact: this ain’t your colonist schoolmarm’s New England Primer. In The Truth About Facts, Bart Vautour offers a poetic chrestomathy through which we may un/learn the language “of buoyancy in being.” Ebbs and flows of data, his/tories, and records mingle with inter/personal truths and untruths that gather their colours in an intimate orchestra of alphabetic movements. Yet here, nothing is ever sure, and that’s a fact: cold scientific exactness collides with the warmth of language’s poetic undoing to create a balmy fog of inconclusivity, empathy, and communitas. Under Vautour’s hand, the “y-axis breaks” … and in its space, the self, the other, the other’s others uprise. These are the facts and truths, and their implosions and undoings, that you want to sit with, savour, and, with childlike vigour, question everything you thought you already knew.—Kate Siklosi, co-founding editor of Gap Riot Press and author of po po poems and may day
| Weight | 0.181 kg |
|---|---|
| Dimensions | 20.3 × 12.7 cm |
| Author | Bart Vautour |
| Publication Date | 1 November 2019 |
| Pages | 96 |
Facts about Allotheism
Here are the facts
as we know them:
In the beginning
there was more
than the word.
There are lots of words
in the worship of
strange gods.
Olathe Slim was
on the holiest lam,
after he absconded
with a coarse birretum.
Mollie’s hat, as it was known
among the impertinent.
In a Mali hostel
Olie met Elliot Hams
and from there
they loved
in all directions.
They loved not one
more than the other.
Not once
did they think
to call each other
a rose.
They saw the world
and even hid for a
short time in some of
the most expensive
Lima hotels.
They remained
in constant pilgrimage
and devotionally directed
by poetry and the vague
theories of continental drift
as sketched out
by Arthur Holmes.
Tail ends and cutting edges
nourished their love differently,
albeit in equal amounts.
Very occasionally
they’d send helots mail,
hoping they’d join
the cause of the
in-between.
And sometimes
they’d send messages
into the world anonymously
to news outlets (in countries with
state funding for the arts) via emails
—loth they were to write—
in a lame Lithos, which
left hints of camping
in California state parks.
Their communiqués
were clear: we mustn’t confuse
allotheism with alloethism:
facts and poetics are not
differently sized bees
performing different tasks.
Without a doubt Elliot
would have preferred Baskerville.
But that would have been too plain
and the wrong type of bee.
Too trustworthy.
They’re more irreverent than that.
It’s not trust they are after
when it comes to facts.
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