All Books

Dark Time of Angels, The

$14.95

In The Dark Time of Angels, Pier Giorgio Di Cicco continues the exploration of spiritual themes that he began in the critically acclaimed The Honeymoon Wilderness, which Michael Redhill in The Globe and Mail called, ‘a startling and beautiful work.’ Personal yet universal, Di Cicco’s poetry is marked by a lyricism that is unflinching in the face of chaos and contradiction. In a world of suffering, he identifies faith in the oddest places and joy in the smallest things. The Dark Time of Angels is a powerful testament of hope, by one of our finest writers.

Dark Water Songs

By: Mary Lou Soutar-Hynes

$18.95

The poems in Dark Water Songs begin on the margins of islands and ancestors, and fan out, probing love, loss and life’s dilemmas. They expand and deepen the poetic exploration which began with my earlier collections, mining the reciprocal spaces enabled by the hyphen between Jamaican and Canadian, exploring silences, the weight of memory, and a sense of the sacred. The collection contributes to the body of work by contemporary Canadian writers of Caribbean origin. The perspective is that of a poet/educator and former nun ― a writer who negotiates the world through the lens of islands and continents, landscapes and seas.

Dark Woods

By: Richard Sanger

$18.95

A NEW YORK TIMES BEST POETRY BOOK OF 2018

Snow, canoes, frozen ponds, lonely conifers . . . Dark Woods takes the motifs and landscape of a Canadian childhood and examines their place in a world of smartphones and overflowing inboxes. The result, Sanger’s first book in 16 years, is a striking new collection full of mysteries and reassessments, wordplay, slang, and sonnets, meditations on parenthood and the “cracks in the granite”: those urges that won’t go away, and the people who have.

Darkening Archipelago, The

By: Stephen Legault

$19.95

Eight months after his own brush with death over Alberta’s Cardinal Divide, Cole Blackwater has learned that his good friend and former client Archie Ravenwing is presumed dead on the waters of British Columbia’s Broughton Archipelago. Days before his disappearance, Ravenwing was on the brink of unravelling a corporate conspiracy surrounding an outbreak of sea lice that could decimate wild salmon along the BC coastline. While Cole and newspaper reporter Nancy Webber search for answers, Cole is haunted by the dark secret surrounding his own father’s mysterious death. For Nancy Webber, whose long-forgotten feelings for Cole have risen to the surface again, getting to the bottom of Cole’s family history becomes both a professional and personal obsession. The Darkening Archipelago, the second book of the Cole Blackwater series, is a race to keep both human souls and wild ecosystems from falling into darkness.

Darker Shade of Blue

By: Keith Merith

$28.95

A transparent first-hand account of a Black officer maneuvering through three terrifying yet rewarding decades of policing, all while seeking reform in law enforcementWhen 16-year-old Keith Merith finds himself pulled over, berated, and degraded by a white police officer, he’s outraged. He’s done nothing wrong. But the officer has the power, and he doesn’t. From that day on, he vows to join a police service and effect change from within.Twelve years and a multitude of infuriating applications later, Merith is finally hired by York Regional Police. Subjected to unfair treatment and constant microaggressions, he perseveres and gradually rises through the ranks, his goal of systemic change carrying him through. After a stellar career, Merith retires at the rank of superintendent, but his desire for sustained and equitable reform is stronger than ever.In A Darker Shade of Blue, Merith shares both his gut-wrenching and heart-warming experiences and advocates for immediate police reform in a balanced and level-headed manner. He praises the people in blue, but he also knows on a visceral level that there are deep issues that need to be rectified — starting with recruitment. He knows that law enforcement agencies should reflect the communities they serve and protect, and that all citizens should be treated equally. Entrusted with the duty to serve, Merith delivers an evocative perspective of policing by providing the opportunity to walk in his shoes, as a Black man, and as a police officer on the front lines.

Darkness and Silence

By: Tim Bowling

$16.95

In his fourth collection of poetry, Tim Bowling continues his exploration of loss, heartache, joy and wonder. Employing a supple lyricism that is at turns tender and fierce, he draws on his experiences as a father and son, on his memories of childhood, and on his journeys into landscape as ways to explore the deep mysteries at the heart of consciousness. Darkness and Silence moves from the lush riverscape of BC’s south coast to the eerie moonscape of the Alberta badlands, from elegiac considerations of the lives of other writers (such as Al Purdy in “Elegy for an Elegist” and Willa Cather in “I Went into the Gardens of the Empress Hotel”), to the imagistic meditations on the simple acts of washing dishes, going for a walk, or returning home after a day’s work.These highly crafted poems, rich with startling metaphors and vivid images, underline Robert Frost’s idea that poetry is, above all else, a performance. Bowling believes wholeheartedly in emotion and drama, and he puts his deep love and respect for the sounds and rhythms of English into every line he writes. Intellectual without being academic, and philosophical without being abstract, he is a poet fully engaged with the challenges, beauties and hard truths of day-to-day living.

Darkness at the Edge of Town

By: Stan Rogal

$20.00

A ghostly tale of family ties and madness.

A young man, Ray, returns to where he was born, Weyburn, SK, after several years traveling anonymously around the country. He’s recently been suffering from frightening nightmares and he feels they may have something to do with his past, especially within the walls of the abandoned former mental asylum where his father had worked and his mother had been a patient. Old loves, old wounds and old grievances are rekindled, made especially difficult by the fact that his brother is the town sheriff and is also married to Ray’s former girlfriend. The presence of an older, mute, indigenous woman adds to the mystery

Darkness, Then a Blown Kiss

By: Golda Fried

$12.95

These stories are diary shreds of young women who are in school but things happen anyway. Girls with their hears open like agar petri dishes. The setting could be Toronto, Montreal, New Orleans, a Gothic castle or a bathtub. What people say matters. The girl might finally find someone she can talk to but falls asleep too soon. She will fall down taking the scenery with her. Stars are brought down into sugar containers and stirred into coffee. A couch is thrown out on the grass and you’re invited to have a seat.

Daruma Days

By: Terry Watada

$14.95

Set in the internment camps of the British Columbia interior during World War II, Terry Watada’s Daruma Days captures the Japanese Canadian experience of imprisonment. Watada draws on the accounts of people who lived through the camps, often speaking with the voices of the issei and nisei, to portray the camps as haunted by demonic forces, the inhabitants caught between two worlds: the cultures of Japan and Canada.

Darwin Alone in the Universe

By: M.A.C. Farrant

$17.95

These new, off-side stories continue M.A.C. Farrant’s exploration of the relation of fiction to the evolving corporate construction of reality in the media and information age. Objective reality (what’s out there) in our culture has become a performance of make-believe (fiction), and the disassociation and confusion this causes in our private lives often triggers uncontrollable tragi-comic effects in people—a deadening lethargy and/or a destructive violence acted out in a context of the most excruciatingly bright banalities.

Reading The Origin of the Species today, we realize that the prevailing view of the universe is always only that—the prevailing view—and that the job at hand is therefore to discover the constantly recurring human “will to meaning,” the ways in which we frame existence, sustaining ourselves in the face of what we continue to convince ourselves is the inevitable.

Darwin Alone in the Universe stands against the view that we live in a “post-historical” world in which whatever history we now possess is served up as the current spectacle in a tyranny of the perpetual “now.” It is a reaffirmation of history as a process that clears a path through the world, making sense of making sense, temporarily. In this, or any world, literature becomes an antidote to the stranglehold the corporate media has on the public’s imagination, and is the place where uncontaminated thought can still be found, “where individual voices surface relentlessly like life-rings in a wild sea.”

Darwin’s Moving

By: Taylor Lambert

$20.95

In a city known for wealth and prosperity, the divide between haves and have-nots is rarely clearer than on moving day, when those two worlds come together in intimate fashion. Violent ex-cons and drug addicts are invited into spacious homes, entrusted with the care and transport of the possessions of the upper classes — a unique bridging of two normally segregated worlds.

Darwin’s Moving is an intriguing and affecting exploration of class divides by a journalist and former mover. Taylor Lambert takes us behind the scenes of a familiar industry that is almost completely undocumented in Canadian literature to reveal the cycles of poverty and addiction that ensnare its workers. This is the Other Calgary, a world populated by transient men and women struggling to survive in a boomtown’s shadow.

Date With Destiny

By: Hélène Rioux

$20.00

In this collection of ten short stories, the main characters — women between the ages of 13 to 88 — see death appear suddenly in their daily lives: in the pages of a novel written by a former lover, in a farewell letter abandoned on a living room coffee table, in the memory of a first love. Although disturbing in their truth, these stories are written in luminous prose that reconciles us — almost — with that ultimate rendezvous, our own Date With Destiny.

Dating

By: Dave Williamson

$19.00

Jenkins never dreamed he’d live long enough to be dating again. Old folks acting like teenagers was unheard of in his parents’ generation. Less than two years after his beloved wife’s death, Jenkins finds himself sheepishly slinking past her portrait to take another woman out to the movies. With good (and sometimes not-so-good) memories of his youth, Jenkins recalls his dating experiences through the decades — and finds that he is still no wiser than a schoolboy. Especially when he learns his high school grad date is back n town and newly widowed. Will she be the same sweet Janie who made his grad night perfect or will age have taken its toll? Things don’t look good when her son greets him at the door with a list of rules. The tables have turned and the parents are now the children. Boomers will connect on many levels with this outrageously funny portrayal of their generation grappling with the realities of growing older.

Daughters of Men

By: Brenda Leifso

$18.00

Vivid accessible poems revealing the mythic proportions of a seemingly simple, rural childhood and the passions that course through every life.what do you do
with other people’s memories
when they are carved into this land
the land offering up proof
— from “Prayer for Rain”Brenda Leifso’s first volume of poetry is a stunning debut: haunting, disturbing but resolutely beautiful. With an unflinching eye, Leifso explores the uncertainty of memory, the legacy of place, the powerful dynamics of sexuality and secrecy, and the violence inherent in family relations. Her central section, “The Theban Women,” is a multi-voiced re-imagining of Euripides”s The Bacchae; this drama in verse gives voice to women long silent, and together with Leifso’s more personal poems, it forms a book of exceptional power from a poet whose voice is as honest as it is beautiful.”In Daughters of Men, Brenda Leifso demonstrates a subtlety of heart, mind and soul that represents a new level of maturity for poetry in the West. Her book encompasses, among other things, a Greek tragedy of inherited crime within the family which, for the one who does not share in it, provokes a slow-burning jealousy and sorrow at the exclusion. Is this a mind-set and verse that only a mad Alberta poet or Greek tragedian could invent? Or is it as simple as wanting to have one’s rightful share — of the abuse and of the beauty, of a land and of a family. Brenda Leifso looks for the gold in the tar, and remarkably extracts it for her readers.” — George McWhirter (Inaugural Poet Laureate of Vancouver)

Daughters of Silence

By: Rebecca Fisseha

$22.95

Strong female voice, a clear-eyed narrator examining self and family.

Ash from the Eyjafjallajökull volcano fills the skies. Flights are grounded throughout Europe. Dessie, a cosmopolitan flight attendant from Canada, finds herself stranded in Addis Ababa — her birth place.

Grieving her mother’s recent death, Dessie heads to see her grandfather, the Shaleqa — compelled as much by duty as her own will. But Dessie’s conflicted past stands in her way. Just as the volcano’s eruption disordered Dessie’s work life, so too does her mother’s death cause seismic disruptions in the fine balance of self-deceptions and false histories that uphold her family.

As Dessie reacquaints herself with her grandfather’s house, familiar yet strangely alien to her diasporic sensibilities, she pieces together the family secrets: the trauma of dictatorship and civil war, the shame of unwed motherhood, the abuse met with silence that gives shape to the mystery of her mother’s life.

Reminiscent of the deeply immersive writing of Taiye Selasi and Arundhati Roy, Rebecca Fisseha’s Daughters of Silence is psychologically astute and buoyed both by metaphor and by the vibrant colours of Ethiopia. It’s an impressive debut.

Dave Godfrey and HIs Works

By: Michael Larson

$9.95

This volume explores the life and works of Dave Godfrey. These studies of Canadian authors fulfill a real need in the study of Canadian literature. Each monograph is a separately bound study that contains a biography of the author, a description of the tradition and milieu that influenced the author, a survey of the criticism on the author, a comprehensive essay on all the author’s key works, and a detailed bibliography of primary and secondary works.

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