A Generous Latitude

Lenea Grace’s debut collection maps a series of relationships within a greater exploration of Canadiana, barreling through shield and crag, river and slag. A Generous Latitude is not afraid of beer, bears, internal rhyme, David Hasselhoff, sediment, or sentiment. It does, however, eschew sliding down lampposts, CBC sitcoms, McGarrigles, and the sentimental. Taking humor in the human condition, A Generous Latitude toys with juxtapositions of the serious with the silly, the irreverent with more somber realities. Music both teases and generates the poems within the collection. Here, Guy Lafleur’s hockey-disco hybrid album is on par with the Righteous Brothers and Fleetwood Mac. Here, “I’m not smoking and it’s not analog, / but at 2 a.m., it is always 1979.” A Generous Latitude takes a wild, peculiar joy in supplanting the expected with rich imagery that lights the mundane and “strips the Atlantic bare.”

Latitude 20.04N, Longitude 155.71W is a Hawaiian story told through snapshots and snippets of the lives of fabled and fictionalized family members named Lindsey, Beckley, and others. Through them, I recall bits and pieces of Hawaiis rich and glorious past, everyday folks living ordinary lives doing extraordinary things. I hope you, as the reader, will be able to relate to and find the tie that binds us as Gods childrenone planet, one people, one purpose. A wide swath of time is covered in this book of short chapters from the creation of the Hawaiian Islands (eighty million years ago), to the landing of our people at Waiahukini (AD 300), to the arrival of James Cook (1778) and the first New England Missionary Company (1820), to the establishment of sugar and pineapple plantations and cattle empires (1800s), and to the political trade winds that blew across the archipelago; and from chiefdoms to unified kingdom (1819), to provisional government (1893), to republic (1895), to territory (1900), and to statehood (1959). Holly Birch and Mister John are focal characters. Latitude 20.04N, Longitude 155.71W is history written in shorthand in a fun, interesting, and dynamic way. I started this journey with that intent. I hope I have achieved my intention. You be the judge. Always with aloha . . . Bob Lindsey.

High-latitude settings are sensitive to climatically driven palaeoenvironmental change and the resultant biotic response. Climate change through the peak interval of Cretaceous warmth, Late Cretaceous cooling, onset and expansion of the Antarctic ice sheet, and subsequently the variability of Neogene glaciation, are all recorded within the sedimentary and volcanic successions exposed within the James Ross Basin, Antarctica. This site provides the longest onshore record of Cretaceous-Tertiary sedimentary and volcanic rocks in Antarctica and is a key reference section for Cretaceous-Tertiary global change. The sedimentary succession is richly fossiliferous, yielding diverse invertebrate, vertebrate and plant fossil assemblages, allowing the reconstruction of both terrestrial and marine systems. The papers within this volume provide an overview of recent advances in the understanding of palaeoenvironmental change spanning the mid-Cretaceous to the Neogene of the James Ross Basin and related biotic change, and will be of interest to many working on Cretaceous and Tertiary palaeoenvironmental change.