A Novel

ISBN 978-1-897235-62-1; paper; $18.95 CAD; 128 pages, trade paper; August 2009

The Wolsenburg Clock chronicles the development of a complex machine, and the risks and devotion that went into its construction throughout the Medieval, Renaissance, Enlightenment, and Modern periods of history.

In a small Austrian city near the Italian border, a Canadian academic wants desperately to save a 600-year-old artifact while Second World War bombs terrorize the area. The artifact, a fourteenth century astronomical clock, has been constructed and restored by a series of gifted individuals dedicated to producing the finest timepiece of their age. From its creation in the newly consecrated cathedral in Wolsenburg, to its near-demise in a unruly fire, to it’s final incarnation as the most impressive clock ever built, the academic uncovers the secrets and infatuations of the clock’s remarkable engineers. This magical device — that kept time, charted celestial motion, and entertained parishioners with a show of automated figures — was not built without personal costs.

Creating an engaging fiction about an extraordinary contraption and its brilliant mechanics, Jay Ruzesky also sketches the battle between the Church and the scientists of the time who desired to be at the forefront of social conscience as time became understood and measured in new ways in Western Europe.

Blue Himalayan Poppies

Poetry

ISBN: 978-0-88971-176-1 · 0-88971-176-3
$16.95 · Paperback 5.75 x 8.5 · 112 pp · October 2001

With Blue Himalayan Poppies, Jay Ruzesky collects his best poetry of the past seven years. Acclaimed as one of Canada's most interesting and innovative contemporary poets for his first two books, Am I Glad to See You (Thistledown, 1992) and the highly praised and influential Painting the Yellow House Blue (Anansi, 1994), Ruzesky has produced his best collection yet.

Ruzesky applies his fully matured and honed skills to the creation of a stunning fresco that spans the universal dilemma of life itself: the haunting and invigorating importance of family and lifelong friends ("the way the sudden memory of someone/ surprises the mind"), both the comfort and the solitude brought about by love, the ever-present desire of escape and the never ending circle of the routine, destruction and most importantly, regeneration.

In Blue Himalayan Poppies, a borrowed book becomes a stolen token of intimate love, a looming mushroom cloud signifies a teenage couple's belief in the overriding power of human vitality, an empty hotel room turns into a scene of lust so intense and unbridled that it could only be a product of a maid's imagination and a common household is transformed into a glowing Garden of Eden by a sidewalk chalk artist. Jay Ruzesky's exploration of everyday life is a boon and a treasure to us all; he offers the big picture, in which he is just as likely to inform little plastic men found under the couch that "grief/ is the other side/ of the pleasure your faces speak of" as he is to relate the astonishment of looking into the night sky and realizing "'Oh my God, it's full of stars.'"

Painting the Yellow House Blue

Poetry

ISBN: 0-88784-5541 $12.95 CDN

One of Canada's most interesting and innovative contemporary poets, Jay Ruzesky finds profundity in the absurd, often by recontextualizing pop culture icons in evocative ways and locating meaning where others don't bother to look.

Am I Glad to See You

Poetry

ISBN 0-920633-96-X; paper; $; 64 pages, trade; 1992

An inspiring first collection that, in the author's words, “explores the myth of the unreasonable, unattainable things we hold in front of our noses like carrots.”

Reviews

Almon, Bert. Canadian Book Review Annual (1994): 3220-5.
Dempster, Barry. Museletter (Spring 1993): 10-11.
Sacuta, Norm. “Poets tackle prairie hardship.” Edmonton Journal . July 19, 1992. C7.

List Price: $7.50 Cdn $5.25 US