One Building in the Earth: New and Selected Poems

( With generous selections from earlier, critically accla...)

With generous selections from earlier, critically acclaimed full-length collections like Talking Prophet Blues and Eating Glass, as well as work from landmark underground chapbooks like Because the Gunman and Graffiti for JJ Harper, this collection presents, for the first time, the range and scope of Maggie Helwig’s unique and inspiring poetry. Spanning two decades, and including new and never-before collected material, One Building In The Earth presents Helwig’s thematic and poetic trajectory in ways that make her stunning political and spiritual insight a cornerstone of contemporary Canadian literature. One Building In The Earth includes "Hunger and the Watchmen" — a celebrated poetic reconsideration of Simone Weil — in its entirety. It, like many of Helwig’s best- known works, while recently out-of-print, take on a vital new life in this collection. Whether exploring the relationship between the city and the body, our collective longing for mercy or grace, or the possibility of our lives being cherished — despite history and war and the damage we sometimes do to one another — Maggie Helwig pushes the limits and sets new poetic standards: these are words that matter.

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Girls Fall Down

( Selected as the 2012 Title for One Book Toronto A girl...)

Selected as the 2012 Title for One Book Toronto A girl faints in the Toronto subway. Her friends are taken to the hospital with unexplained rashes; they complain about a funny smell in the subway. Swarms of police arrive, and then the hazmat team. Panic ripples through the city, and words like poisoning and terrorism become airborne. Soon, people are collapsing all over the city in subways and streetcars and malls, always prompted, they say, by some unidentifiable odour. Alex was witness to this first episode. He’s a photographer: of injuries and deaths, for his job at the hospital, and of life, in his evening explorations of every nook and cranny of the city. Alex is a diabetic, now facing the very real possibility of losing his sight, and he’s determined to create a permanent vision of his city through his camera lens. As he rushes to take advantage of his dying sight, he encounters an old girlfriend – the one who shattered his heart in the eighties, while she was fighting for abortion rights and social justice and he was battling his body’s chemical demons. But now Susie-Paul is fighting her own crisis: her schizophrenic brother has been missing for months, and the streets of Toronto are more hostile than ever. Maggie Helwig, author of the critically lauded Between Mountains, has fashioned a novel not of bold actions but of small gestures, showing how easy and gentle is the slide into paranoia, and how enormous and terrifying is the slide into love. This is a remarkable novel: romantically and politically charged, utterly convincing in its portrait of our individual and societal instability, and steadfast in its faith in redemption.

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One Building in the Earth: New and Selected Poems by Helwig, Maggie (2002) Paperback

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Walking Through Fire

(In the fifteenth century, a tide of witch-hunts swept thr...)

In the fifteenth century, a tide of witch-hunts swept through Germany with unparalleled ferocity; its victims: women. Out of this dark history, Walking Through Fire recreates the urgency of a hopeless situation and its inevitable conclusion.

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Apocalypse Jazz

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Girls Fall Down by Maggie Helwig (2004-04-14)

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Between Mountains

(Maggie Helwig's stunning British debut is that rare kind ...)

Maggie Helwig's stunning British debut is that rare kind of war novel, a gripping, poignant, thoughtful, subtly imagined story about the ripples that carry on long after the fighting is over, and about two people kept apart by history, ethics and human frailty. Moral, personal and social boundaries are transgressed, with tragic results - as a simultaneous interpreter at the war crimes tribunal gets too close to a journalist who reports from former Yugoslavia. Daniel is a war correspondent in Bosnia, a stringer and a loner, a truthteller up to a point, careless with everything except his sources...('all right as long as I stay in a war zone'). Lili is based in Paris, of Serbian-Albanian origin, careful, blonde, meticulous, but when she finds herself working for the war crimes tribunal in The Hague, fails to declare a fragile relationship. Helwig unpeels the human cost of a terrible war, from Bosnia to Lambeth via Belgrade, Paris and The Hague. As the novel opens, Daniel watches a dawn raid on the house of a suspected war criminal - a good father almost certainly responsible for thousands of deaths. And the story ends with an apocalyptic millennium eve.

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Where She Was Standing

( A gripping political thriller that mixes suspense and m...)

A gripping political thriller that mixes suspense and moral seriousness in ways reminiscent of both Michael Ondaatje and Graham Greene, Where She Was Standing is a moving and exquisitely crafted debut novel from one of Canada’s finest poets. With an international scope of compassion and escalating tension, Maggie Helwig uses the voices and stories of a strong and varied cast of characters to shape a world in which it’s far too “easy to lose people.” A book about disappearance and surveillance, Where She Was Standing contrasts involuntary and overtly political tragedies with the dirty little secrets of our big cities, the deliberate invisibility of society’s dangerous fringe and the emotional unavailability of scarred and scared individuals.  The murder of Lisa James, a young black Canadian photographer, in Indonesian-occupied East Timor, unifies everyone; the presence of her absence, her life, memory, and principles guide both her mother and boyfriend, as well as a journalist, a doctor, and a human rights activist she has never met, through fragile and subterranean explorations of the heart and soul. Their quest is simple, their quest is impossible: their quest is the truth. With both its poetry and its treacherous political landscape, Where She Was Standing is as suspenseful as it is breath-taking. This rare combination has led Helwig to produce something rarer still: an utterly essential page-turner.

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