186pp, 7"x 9" trade                                       

ISBN: 0-911287-582                                                

$18.00 USD

"We don't have a choice in the matter. The dark matter."

Taking the next step in a lifetime of activism, poet Jody Aliesan left the United States for Canada after the invasion of Iraq. "'Love it or leave it,' they said. So I did." 

In True North/Nord Vrai she traces the roots of her decision back to when she was eight years old, first realizing that something was very different about her mother. From that day Aliesan moves forward and backward in time, on a scale from family to nation and in all four compass directions before finding refuge in the landscape and culture of Canada.

The result is a multi-genre memoir, a narrative collage about pathological liars, psychopaths, cruelty, hypocrisy, denial, pretension, concealment, orientation, maps, finding the truth. 

The book, designed by John D. Berry, is unusual in both dimensions and content. As publisher Jim Bodeen observes, "Its heart comes from poetry, but there are more than 40 forms and genres in this book" including news article, letter, poem, song, essay, academic paper, lecture notes, interview, homily, parable, and the voice of an oracle.

Scenes suggest cinema; journal entries are interrupted by a radio broadcast. In the margins stand childhood drawings, a map, images of sheet music, and side notes commenting on the main text. The message is in multiple media; evidence and testimony are intertextual.

An opening epigraph quotes Marshall McLuhan: “The artist can be rewarded as a navigator who gives adequate compass bearings in spite of magnetic deflection of the needle by the changing play of forces."

The reader is guided by motifs of compass, map, and scout; travel by foot, bus, train, and air; forces of nature, the seasons, of cosmic wind, stars and fate; dark matter, dark energy, and light; images of doors, windows, and trees; leaving home, going far away, carrying home inside.

True North/Nord Vrai is also a love story, with an Irish thread running through it. All the threads gather in a final poem and an appendix in e-mail form, closing a circle with the preamble and illuminating the cover.

In the preamble Aliesan writes, "We take the risk of charting this journey, tracing the truth as we find it, making maps as accurately as we are able so that others can pass through the territory unharmed…. We have to trust whatever has sent us this way, whether it points the compass inward or out, because we don't have a choice in the matter. The dark matter."