• The Order in Which We Do Things
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The Order in Which We Do Things

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Tom Wayman’s poetry has been published around the world to great acclaim. Wayman is one of Canada’s most prolific and public poets, and his writing since the 1960s has been by turns angry, engaged,...
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  • 19 February 2014
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Tom Wayman’s poetry has been published around the world to great acclaim. Wayman is one of Canada’s most prolific and public poets, and his writing since the 1960s has been by turns angry, engaged, hopeful, tender, and hilarious. His voice and persona are his alone but simultaneously ours too. His recurring themes—work, mortality, love, lust, friendship, the natural world—make his work a poetry of human inevitabilities, a poetry that exults in the inevitability of seeing poetry in the everyday. Wayman’s craft is poïesis (from the Ancient Greek “to make”)—making a change, making a difference, making a ruckus, making the most of our time. His working life has always been inextricable from his writing one; his poems offer an honest and candid consideration of the ideological underpinnings, practical realities, and subtle beauties of a life lived on job sites and picket lines, in union halls, classrooms, and book-stuffed offices, and on the page itself. The Order in Which We Do Things is a collection of more than thirty of Wayman’s best poems, selected and introduced by Owen Percy. Percy’s introduction explores the genesis of Wayman’s print persona and contextualizes his politically engaged, conversational voice within the pantheon of its various publics. In his afterword, “Work and Silence,” Wayman reflects on his more than forty years in print as a work poet, and underlines poetry’s sustained power to engage readers, invite solidarity, and stoke the fires of critical resistance to the order in which we do things.
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Price: $22.99
Pages: 112
Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
Imprint: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
Series: Laurier Poetry
Publication Date: 19 February 2014
Trim Size: 9.00 X 6.00 in
ISBN: 9781554589951
Format: Paperback
BISACs: LITERARY CRITICISM / Poetry
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Tom Wayman has published nineteen poetry collections, edited six anthologies of poets writing about their employment, and published three collections of essays on labour arts. He has taught at the post-secondary level in the United States and Canada and co-founded the Vancouver Industrial Writers Union and the Vancouver Centre of the Kootenay School of Writing. Wayman has been the recipient of several significant literary awards over his career, most recently the 2013 Acorn-Plantos Award for People's Poetry for his book Dirty Snow.
|Owen Percy is a teacher, writer, editor, and critic of North American and postcolonial literature. He earned his Ph.D. in Canadian literature and literary culture from the University of Calgary in 2010. He is a professor of literary studies at Sheridan College in Brampton, Ontario

Table of Contents for The Order in Which We Do Things: The Poetry of Tom Wayman, selected with an introduction by Owen Percy
Foreword, Neil Besner
Biographical Note
Introduction: Wayman in Print: “He Do the Polis in Different Voices,” Owen Percy
Days: Construction
Picketing Supermarkets
Wayman in Love
The Country of Everyday: Literary Criticism
The Factory Hour
The Old Power
Industrial Music
Factory Time
Garrison
Friday Night in Early September at Morris and Sara Wayman's Farm, Roseneath, Ontario
White Hand
Silos
Paper, Scissors, Stone
The Face of Jack Munro
A Cursing Poem: This Poem Wants Gordon Shrum to Die
The Poet
Defective Parts of Speech: Official Errata
Did I Miss Anything?
The Man Who Logged the West Ridge
For William Stafford (1914-1993)
War on a Round Planet
Cup
Epithalamium for a Former Lover
Calgary
Postmodern 911
Mt. Gimli Pashtun
Air Support
Whistle
The White Dogs
Minutes
Breath
Afterword: Work and Silence, Tom Wayman
Acknowledgements