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A Few Words Will Do
$16.95These brief but concentrated pieces of literary work seem at first simple in their approach and straightforward in their intent: designed to be read easily and then to be carried away in our memories. As if they were ours. But when one person writes “this is what happened, this is what I remember, this is what I saw, this is what I know,” any reader stands in for and thereby becomes the absent “I” or “eye” of that written text. The deconstruction of this inescapable process of language, metaphor, is what preoccupies Lionel Kearns in A Few Words Will Do.
At first, the narrator seems caught up in the mystery of the unfathomably limitless depth of motherly love in the poem “Dorothy”; with the alchemical marriage of time and space in “Lines for Gerri” (and what are to become the recurrent phases “here to then” and “between now and there”); then he proceeds through naïve realist scenes of family life and birth in “With My Daughter” and “Miracle” to find the ongoing wonder of his father’s unfathomable actions (and the book’s metanarrative) in “Composition.” This celebration of apparent meaning at the heart of the ordinary that opens the book is so accomplished it seems unassailable with the tools of deconstruction. The book’s centre however turns on a selection of hybrid “open source” virtual prose meditations on chaos, chance and consequence, after which the narrator increasingly begins to address the poem itself as the subject, moving the reader into a position of explicit complicity with the writer, a complicity in which “A Muse” cannot escape the irony of its linguistic shadow, “amuse.” There is a materiality to the world over which the greatest abstraction cannot triumph, Kearns proposes here: all abstraction seeks to arrest time; all sentiment seeks to reverse it.
a fist made and then un-made
$4.95a fist made and then un-made
A Fit Month for Dying
$19.95A Fit Month for Dying is the third book in M.T. Dohaney’s highly praised trilogy about the women of Newfoundland’s outports. Fans of The Corrigan Women and To Scatter Stones will embrace this new book, while those reading the author for the first time will discover her characteristic bittersweet humour. Tess Corrigan seems to be living the good life. She is a popular politician, the first woman to serve as a Member of the House of Assembly. Her husband Greg is a successful lawyer and son Brendan is a seemingly happy hockey-mad twelve-year-old. Originally from the village of The Cove, the family is now comfortably ensconced in Newfoundland’s capital city of St. John’s. Urged on by Greg’s mother Philomena, Tess sets out to unravel her convoluted family tree. She searches out her natural father who is living in a retirement community, or as he calls it a “raisin farm,” in Arizona. Ed Strominski was an American serving at the Argentia Naval Base when he married Tess’s mother Carmel. Charming and outgoing, his one flaw was neglecting to reveal the small detail that he already had a wife. The stigma of growing up as the daughter of the abandoned “poor Carmel” has shaped Tess’s life.
Involved with her own family problems and with her political work, Tess has no inkling of trouble when Brendan begs her to let him quit the Altar Servers’ Association at their St. John’s church. Always forthright, Tess insists that he fulfill his responsibilities to the organization. Her decision sets into motion a series of betrayals, revelations, and realizations that change forever her family and the village of The Cove. After a confrontation with the father of one of Brendan’s friends, Tess is shattered by the disclosure that her son has been abused by their trusted priest, Father Tom. Shame and grief envelop the family and their world becomes as turbulent as the seas of Newfoundland. Deeply held beliefs are destroyed as the characters begin to challenge long imposed systems of cultural, political, and spiritual authority. But out of the ashes of Tess’s life a small phoenix of hope arises in the form of Greg’s brother who, on his way to a feed of capelin, reveals to her his own story of abuse and survival. Buoyed by his story, Tess begins to gather strength to rebuild her life, her family, and her faith in human nature.
A Force Such as the World Has Never Known
$34.95A Force Such as the World Has Never Known: Women Creating Change is a unique collection of narratives from women from all around the globe. These are stories of compassion and bravery, empowered by the vision of a better world for all life. It emphasizes the need to empower the feminine and assure gender balance and human rights for all. This accumulation of women’s stories reveals the role of women in creating needed changes in areas of health and nutrition, supporting efforts toward sustainable environments, promoting political and social rights, protecting women from the travesties of war and rape and promoting religious diversity and better conditions for all beings.
A Forgotten Hero
$32.95The true story of Folke Bernadotte’s heroic rescue of 30,000 prisoners during WWII
In one of the most amazing rescues of WWII, the Swedish head of the Red Cross rescued more than 30,000 people from concentration camps in the last three months of the war. Folke Bernadotte did so by negotiating with the enemy — shaking hands with Heinrich Himmler, the head of the Gestapo. Time was of the essence, as Hitler had ordered the destruction of all camps and everyone in them.
A Forgotten Hero chronicles Folke’s life and extraordinary journey, from his family history and early years to saving thousands of lives during WWII and his untimely assassination in 1948. A straightforward and compelling narrative, A Forgotten Hero sheds light on this important and heroic historical figure.
A Foster Christmas
$24.95Ethan Claymore
It’s a week before Christmas, and struggling egg farmer/artist Ethan Claymore meets a woman who could turn his life around. But things are shaken up when Ethan receives a visit from his estranged, and recently deceased, older brother.Bob’s Your Elf
An elf named Bob gets banished from the North Pole to learn a lesson about cooperation. Because of his bad attitude, Santa sends him to a small town to help out with their Christmas pageant. Here, Bob is faced with a group of bumbling actors who are doing their best to put on the greatest darn Christmas show their town has ever seen.The Christmas Tree
A tree lot. Christmas Eve. One man. One woman. One tree. Who should get it? Each gives reasons through tales of woe as to why they are more deserving of the tree, and each seems unmoved by the other’s predicament. A story filled with laughs, heartache, and good old-fashioned Christmas spirit.Dear Santa, with music by Steve Thomas
Santa Claus tries to fulfill a child’s special Christmas wish while his staff attempts to overcome a supply shortage at the North Pole. A laugh-filled holiday play, innocent enough for the youngest boy or girl, and entertaining enough for adults.
A Free Man
$18.95An unusual and remarkable dystopian novel
A Free Man is a satirical tall tale presented as the drug and alcohol fuelled conversation of two old friends getting reacquainted over one night. It’s also a boy-meets-girl story of the worst kind and a time travel story about a future where the world is ruled by robots and humans are vermin. When timelines cross, the world as we know it bends . . .
Skid Roe is completely self-absorbed and delusional. His struggle to exercise free will is constantly hampered by the physical manifestation of his inner demons and by the norms and rules of contemporary life. He’s both aided and hindered by Lem, a robot from the future whose good intentions leave Skid on the run from a shadowy state security agency.
A surreal, beautiful, and powerful literary mash-up, Basilières’ long-awaited sophomore effort is inventive and darkly funny.
A Friend Sails in on a Poem
$19.95Palimpsest Press and Molly Peacock are pleased to announce the forthcoming publication of A FRIEND SAILS IN ON A POEM, available for presale in Canada and the United States.
For the last forty-six years, the distinguished poets Molly Peacock and Phillis Levin have read and discussed nearly every poem they?ve written?an unparalleled friendship in poetry. Here Peacock traces the development of their ideas about poetry across their lifelong back-and-forth, quoting their poems, investigating their childhoods, personalities, writing habits, reading habits, and startling differences. She speculates about their challenges as they meet across seminar tables, kitchen tables, coffee, tea and restaurant tables from their twenties through their sixties and seventies. A Friend Sails in on a Poem offers a charming, psychologically wise, and metaphorically piquant look at navigating craft, creativity, and companionship. This is a book both for serious poets as well as for anyone who wants a deep dive into the impact of friendship on art itself.
A Future Perfect
$16.95The constraint-based poems in this debut collection are written in the future-perfect tense, used as a way of bending time and playing with non-linearity. They challenge the “self” imagined as a unified monolith by pulling language apart, dissecting idioms and speech, then reassembling it in new and unconventional ways, using language as a medium not only for its literal sense, but also its auditory dimension. Cadence is another focus, as the ordering and pairing of slightly dissonant words creates moments of the uncanny, altering perceptions to push language beyond functional, ordinary usage. As we dismantle the linguistic binds that keep us stuck in traditional templates and labels, A Future Perfect moves us forward, freeing our inner landscapes, enabling us to dispense with the superfluous spokes of our world views, in an effort to continuously reinvent ourselves. Imagery of sky, landscape, organic hollows, biological crevices, architectural edifices, surfaces and topologies are used to evoke a kinaesthetic and tactile sense of space. Finally, calling on nature lends emotional and psychic valence, giving contour to the basic human drives of love and death – Eros and Thanatos – that propel these poems.
A Gelato A Day
$20.00A Gelato A Day is a collection of travel tales that highlights the good, the bad and the not-really-that-ugly of the family travel experience. These stories go beyond holidays-gone-wrong to dive thoughtfully into the deeper parental and family connections that can occur when we take ourselves (or are taken out of) our daily routines and comfort zones. More often than not, entering unfamiliar places, spaces and situations encourages us to open up to one another or react in ways that may surprise, delight or frustrate those we hold most dear.
A Generous Latitude
$18.95Lenea 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.”
A Generous Spirit: Selected Work by Beth Brant
$22.95Finalist for the 2020 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction
A Generous Spirit: Selected Work by Beth Brant collects the writing of Beth Brant, Mohawk lesbian poet, essayist, and activist. During her life, Brant’s work gave voice to an often unacknowledged Two-Spirit identity, and today, her words represent continued strength, growth, and connection in the face of deep suffering. A Generous Spirit is Brant’s portrait of survival and empathy at the intersection of Native American and lesbian experience. Edited by noted Native poet and scholar Janice Gould, A Generous Spirit recounts and enacts the continuance of her people and her sisters with distinct, organic voices and Brant’s characteristic warmth. Her work is a simultaneous cry of grief and celebration of human compassion and connection in its shared experience. Through storytelling, her characters wrest their own voices from years of silence and find communion with other souls.
A Ghost in the Throat
$22.95An Post Irish Book Awards Nonfiction Book of the Year • A Guardian Best Book of 2020 • Shortlisted for the 2021 Rathbones Folio Prize • Longlisted for the 2021 Republic of Consciousness Prize • Winner of the James Tait Black Biography Prize • A New York Times New & Noteworthy Title • Longlisted for the 2021 Gordon Burn Prize • A Buzzfeed Recommended Summer Read • A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2021 • A Book Riot Best Book of 2022 • An NPR Best Book of 2021 • A Chicago Public Library Best Book of 2021 • A Globe and Mail Book of the Year • A Winnipeg Free Press Top Read of 2021 • An Entropy Magazine Best of the Year • A LitHub Best Book of 2021 • A New York Times Critics’ Top Book of 2021 • A National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist
When we first met, I was a child, and she had been dead for centuries.
On discovering her murdered husband’s body, an eighteenth-century Irish noblewoman drinks handfuls of his blood and composes an extraordinary lament. Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill’s poem travels through the centuries, finding its way to a new mother who has narrowly avoided her own fatal tragedy. When she realizes that the literature dedicated to the poem reduces Eibhlín Dubh’s life to flimsy sketches, she wants more: the details of the poet’s girlhood and old age; her unique rages, joys, sorrows, and desires; the shape of her days and site of her final place of rest. What follows is an adventure in which Doireann Ní Ghríofa sets out to discover Eibhlín Dubh’s erased life—and in doing so, discovers her own.
Moving fluidly between past and present, quest and elegy, poetry and those who make it, A Ghost in the Throat is a shapeshifting book: a record of literary obsession; a narrative about the erasure of a people, of a language, of women; a meditation on motherhood and on translation; and an unforgettable story about finding your voice by freeing another’s.
A Ghost in Waterloo Station
$18.95The poems in A Ghost in Waterloo Station take the everyday world as their point of departure, but the place of arrival is never the shore you started from. Vivid invocations and meditations on childhood, art, and travel bring together places and people as likeable and unexpected as the wry poetic sensibility recommending them to our attention. Greece is a country where clarity / is inescapable unless it forces your lids shut. Swallows enter their nests high on the white stacked walls at Indian Lodge as if the ghost/ of a remorseful pickpocket/ were slipping a wallet/ back where it come from. There is much humour here, and warmth, combined with an awareness of loss and the weight of history—all delivered in a voice distinctive in its combination of narrative, whimsy, and psychological observation.
A Glittering Chaos
$22.95The adage about “what happens in Vegas” is funny precisely because we know it’s wishful thinking. A Glittering Chaos is about what happens when “what happens in Vegas” comes home to haunt you. Melusine is a German librarian whose ho-hum world wobbles after she tags along when her husband Hans attends a Las Vegas optometry conference. A newly empty nester who speaks no English, Melusine’s voyage of self-discovery is punctuated by the poetry of Ingeborg Bachmann, nude photos in the desert, a black dildo named Kurt, autoerotic asphyxia, and the unravelling of her husband’s sanity because of a secret from his youth. A smart, funny and incredibly wise novel about marriage, secrets and lies, and unusual sexual proclivities.
A God in Need of Help
$17.95Nominated for the 2014 Governor General’s Literary Award for Drama
It’s 1606 and Europe is at war over God. At the behest of the Holy Roman Emperor, Rudolf II, Venice’s four strongest men are charged with transporting a holy painting – Albrecht Dürer’s The Brotherhood of the Rosary – across the Alps to Prague. In the small Alpine village of Pusterwald, they are set upon by Protestant zealots; their escape is attributed to a miracle.
The strongmen and their captain are summoned to an inquiry, led by the magistrate of Venice and the cardinal archbishop of Milan, to determine whether something divine did indeed occur. Each man’s recounting adds a layer of colour to the canvas.
Through this vividly painted mystery, inspired by true events, Sean Dixon challenges the role of faith at thedawn of the Age of Reason.