Live in a Canadian publisher's house!

For the feel of a house with a history, read this excerpt from the publisher's preface to the just published fourth book of poetry, Relics for an Open Vault, by Jason Holt.

"In 1990, the founding house of AB collector publishing at 5835 Grant Street in Halifax, was lovingly crooked and painted white, the crookedest house in the slowly upwardtending neighbourhood that, then still, showed signs of its origins by sailors and workers, or the occasional shy, mysteriously gifted mathematician, and the equally unreadable stray architect.

"Four years into AB collector publishing’s existence, into the white house, happened a very young poet of but three and twenty, whose brilliancy was evident in every word of the manuscript he asked me to consider. The author was Jason Holt, the manuscript Feeling Fine in Kafka’s Burrow, with more than a bit of Leonard Cohen cunningly adoringly pithily gedichtet into a text of crooked house syntax, with songs most strange, like snatches of Schoenberg, like tiles of the Sagrada Familia in Spain, like Wittgenstein polished with windex — but most of all like Hamlet, the wordcunning philosophical prince of Denmark.

"Now that, eleven years later, 5835 Grant Street in Halifax, has — in addition to its more permanent French Lake, New Brunswick, home — become the transitory seat of AB collector publishing once more, its founding house is host to one of its most unusual amongst unusual projects: the fourth book of Jason Holt’s poetic work, Relics for an Open Vault, is, on forty-seven pages, introduced by Liane Heller’s exhaustive exegesis of the poet’s complete oeuvre so far. A poet of bewitching powers herself — with several books of poetry to her credit, her latest, Exposures, having been published with AB collector publishing in 2003 — Heller is also a willful ingenious scholar of cathartic non-negotiable power, who has given Holt, still only this side of his mid-thirties, a gift few young living poets can boast of, to considerable wit: the scholarship that gives intelligent distance to their work while they are as yet almost entirely inside it. The book here presented is thus dichtung and deutung at its very best and most vocative.

"Meantime the founding house of AB collector publishing is still lovingly crooked, but its garden is tended, and the house is the colour purple. Perhaps the colour, if my words will not do it, is corpus delicti that the above rodomontade is put forth with no improper pride on the publisher’s part, but rather, and in all handmaidenly fashion, fits the publisher’s credo of the pursuit of excellence in word and deed."

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