George Amabile is a Winnipeg based author who has published ten books and has had work in over a hundred national and international publications, including The New Yorker, Poetry (Chicago), American Poetry Review, Botteghe Oscure, The Globe and Mail, The Penguin Book of Canadian Verse, Saturday Night,, Poetry Australia, Sur (Buenos Aires), Poetry Canada Review, and Canadian Literature. He has won the CAA National Prize; placed third in the CBC Literary and Petra Kenney International Competitions; placed second in the Manitoba Writers Guild national poetry contest, “Friends”; received a National Magazine Award and is the subject of a special issue of Prairie Fire. His most recent publications are a long poem, Dancing, with Mirrors (Porcupine’s Quill, 2011) and Small Change (Fiction, Libros Libertad, 2011) both of which won Bressani Awards.
Major Arts Grant Project: Collection of Poems Seeing Things
George’s Major Arts Grant will support work on the creation of a new collection of poems titled Seeing Things. The collection will be presented in three sections organized around the themes of observation, imagination, and understanding. The first section will explore a lifelong fascination with the relationship between pictures and words; the second section will be made up of poems that verge on the surreal, but speak tangentially to contemporary issues; the third section will reflect back and recapitulate themes from the first two sections. Most of these poems will be highly structured, using formal elements such as rhyme, stanza or densely sound-patterned free verse, to simulate the qualities of a painting.
