Corner Pieces
Contributors: Donna Akrey (images), Lance Blomgren (photography), Andy Brown (editor), Joey Dubuc (illustration), Annika Grill (images), Kourosh Mahvash (illustration), Yvette Poorter (images)
Publisher: Conundrum Press
Published: November 2004
Language: eng
Format: Trade Paperback
Number of pages: 114
ISBN-13: 9781894994040
Subjects: Literary Collections; Fiction - General; Literature: Classics; Literary; English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh; Short Fiction; Urbanism
Description: Corner Pieces is Lance Blomgren's eagerly anticipated follow-up to Walkups, his docudrama about Montreal apartments. Evolving out of Blomgren's ongoing fascination with architecture, Corner Pieces finds his distinctive voice expanding out of the domestic sphere and moving onto the streets. 

Composed as a series of elegies to particular places, both real and imaginary, Corner Pieces traces a cartography of desire and frustration, loss and redemption, set amidst the backdrop of the contemporary urban spectacle. In Blomgren's city, the familiar becomes decidely strange. Street corners, indistinct industrial zones, central business districts and public squares become sites where the ideals and failures of urban planning collide with direct, personal experience. Here, lovers make out in discreet, unused corners; protesters march the streets in a bewildered state of empowerment and sadness; a two-storey stack of towels becomes a public sculpture of religious contemplation. 

Blomgren's fictions move formally and conceptually between autobiographical vignette, sociological study, historical monument plan, architecture proposal, civic protest and love ballad, to create a psychological documentary of contemporary urban life.
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"Blomgren is a human conveyor belt of ideas and images" 
-- Montreal Review of Books

"Corner Pieces is dead sexy, whip-smart, a little cheeky, and just big enough to fit into your pocket" 
-- Pacific Rim Review of Books.

"A crooked, smudged line between rhythmic genius and delicate arrogance....[Blomgren] may piss you off, make you laugh out loud, or cause you to reconsider your sexuality." 
--subTerrain

"[Corner Pieces] is art writing without affectation, unless by affect, we mean a biting sense of pathos."
-- Terminal City

"Discontinuity is this book's continuity. It does not read like like a random collection of writings, though in some senses that is just what it is."
-- Vancouver Rain Review of Books

"Corner Pieces flowed through my mind like the cream in my coffee--liberally and to my unctuous benefit...one of the juiciest little packages I've come across in recent times."
-- Hour (Montreal)
Notes: Shortlisted for the ReLit Award, Short Fiction category, 2005
Table of contents: title: Still Life in Motion
pagenum: 7; title: Corner Pieces (Montreal)
pagenum: 13; title: Buskertown
pagenum: 17; title: Time Apart
pagenum: 35; title: Western Express
pagenum: 43; title: Corner Pieces (Banff)
pagenum: 50; title: Liner
pagenum: 57; title: Corner Pieces (Berlin)
pagenum: 69; title: Three Monuments, an Installation and a Work in Progress
pagenum: 77; title: Havenwoodpointegreenterrace-Inc.
pagenum: 85; title: The Complete Owner's Manual
pagenum: 91; title: 34 Stops
pagenum: 109; title: Acknowledgements
pagenum: 112